Ah yes, what started with the question of whether or not Mr. Powell would accept Bob Dole's repeated overtures to be his running mate in 1996 (sorry, Mr. Kemp), now appears headed for
a denouement of sorts, a mere twelve years later, with the recently broken story that Powell will appear Sunday morning on Meet the Press. Endorsements aren't supposed to matter much--ask yourself when the last time was that anyone you knew told you that he'd decided whom to vote for on the basis of one--but if General Powell does in fact choose this moment to make this endorsement, and despite suggestions to the contrary, it will matter a great deal more than most.
For starters there is the question of the timing. Many pundits are suggesting that Powell has waited until the matter is effectively decided to weigh in, and is thus re-introducing us to the same aversion to core integrity that found him at a UN podium talking about yellowcake from Niger that didn't exist. The endorsement isn't supposed to matter, we are told, because people have already made up their minds. It's a well-reasoned argument, but it rather overlooks the small detail that anyone who has already made up his mind probably wouldn't have changed it, earlier, on the basis of Powell. The people left uncommitted in this race are the hard-core uncommitteds--the sort of people who won't be swayed by the documentation of repeated lies about the funding for a bridge, or suggestions that someone wants to teach sex education in kindergarten, either one.
What a Powell endorsement brings to the heuristic decision-making process of such people is an easy-to-grasp, positive message that can be waved in front of their friends at the lunch counter--the un-bloody shirt, as it were. If the patterns of past races or the current state of polling on this one are any indications, most of those still undecided are probably folks who, like Mr. Powell, have been leaning toward the candidate from the non-incumbent party for some time now, and (like Mr. Powell?) just haven't felt that last little-bit sold. If Powell shows them the way to owning such a choice at the lunch counter, a great many of them will buy.
There is also the unique opportunity for packaging the announcement. If Powell really does endorse Obama on Sunday morning (and by the way, can anyone think of another reason why he would be appearing on Meet the Press, just at the moment?), the preamble to his remarks can be crafted specifically to lend further traction to their sway. "A lot of Americans were probably very intrigued by exactly one of these two candidates, but hadn't yet made up their minds because--let's face it--that candidate hadn't gone the final distance to convincing us that he was ready," could well be Powell's opening. "Well, here it is the first Sunday after we've had a chance to see both of these candidates in all three debates, and for the first time I think it's clear to a lot of Americans that this one candidate has met the standard of Presidential conduct, coupled with the right ideas for the future--and that candidate, my choice for President on November 4th, is Barack Obama."
(By the way--no charge for the speech-writing, General Powell.)
The third and most important reason why this moment would in many ways leverage the impact of a hypothesized endorsement, is that the mainstream press would have its story for the crucial Monday headlines. Trailing by a margin that has shown artificial signs of tightening over the past day or two, but which does not reflect McCain's disastrous performance in the final debate, the Republican ticket desperately needs to win every news cycle between now and election day--particularly since so many Americans in key battlegrounds are already voting. With the Monday lead-ins all dominated by Powell's announcement, McCain will have little opportunity for stealing back the story with his "spread the wealth" hot-button. And while it is unlikely that the story of Powell will last much beyond Monday, it doesn't actually matter if it makes a return to the "spread the wealth" story impractical. Instead McCain will have to find yet one more thing new to talk about, at a time when every new thing to talk about only sharpens the questions being raised (and even acknowledged by people like Ed Rollins) regarding his erratic behavior. A Powell endorsement right now, to borrow an analogy from Mr. Obama's favorite sport, will go a long way to dribbling-out what's left of the electoral clock.
Meanwhile, pending Powell's appearance on Meet the Press, Mr. McCain seems once again to be comically, almost willfully incapable of capitalizing on what few and narrow openings he's been given in this contest. In the midst of what should have been one of his strongest counter-punches yet, as surrogates ranging from Rollins to Newt Gingerich were fanning out across the airwaves to say the words "spread the wealth around" a thousand times, his Vice Presidential nominee was busy diluting the message once again--this time by uttering a troika of rapid-fire gaffes that probably held a lot more moment with the remaining undecideds than any nagging inability to name a print-media publication while strolling with Katie Couric.
As you probably know already, Governor Palin told a cheering crowd of working-class voters in Ohio that she'd been enjoying the campaign, first because her handlers had expressly forbidden her from watching the news, on the grounds that it might depress her (!!!), second because she'd been granted her "request" to be spared from speeches mentioning the now-infamous "Joe the Plumber," and third and most damning in the eyes of the persuadable middle, because she was making a point of only visiting the "pro-America states." And that, friends and neighbors, is a statement that Joe Biden isn't about to let slip away.
Those of us who read political columns might take the greatest pause in envisioning a wildly unpopular President Palin, eighteen months from now, being told by her White House Chief of Staff that she is no longer permitted to watch the news. Sure. But here again we must remember to empathize as best we can with the people who haven't yet decided who they want to support, and with these people the "pro-America states" comment is a far more brazen affront to campaign decorum. If they're still undecided after Katie Couric exposed the Palin pick for the folly that it was, then they're not going to be won-over by calling New Mexico un-American. (Palin also, on a separate stop in North Carolina, conspicuously failed to mention that early voting had just gotten underway there, though it isn't obvious whether this was a gaffe by the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, or a calculated gamble to prevent left-leaning television audiences from being reminded of the same fact.)
Elsewhere the fortunes of Team Crankypants took a far more quotidian and less-publicized but potentially far more significant hit, when the Supreme Court ruled that the State of Ohio does not, in fact, have to cage every single one-stop voter for leisurely retribution at the hands of the state Republican party. (And this, we must remember, is the same Supreme Court that thinks it's okay for women not to get equal pay.) Obama also got as highly effectual and paint-peeling endorsement from Virginia's wildly popular Peckerwood-in-Absentia--and former Reagan Republican--Senator Jim Webb, when he introduced Obama at a rally on Friday with remarks that were sound-bitten on every local newscast in The Old Dominion. Oh, and in case you missed it, early voting is underway there, too.
In consequence of all of these rapidly unfolding developments the mainstream press, which was supposed to be spending its last three days completely besotted with the "Joe the Plumber / spread the wealth around" narrative, has only tightened the noose on McCain/Palin with narratives about the race no longer being close. In particular the concern echoed around the electronic news sites on Friday was not whether McCain could mount an improbable comeback, but rather with how the television coverage would deal with the problem of Obama going over 270 electoral votes before the polls had closed on the West Coast. "We can't be in the business of pretending to be stupid," remarked one senior editorial decision-maker on the subject--a comment that, for its very utterance, makes the job of seeming relevant and viable all the tougher for Old Man Get-Off-My-Lawn.
Everywhere McCain looks the situation is getting not better, on the strength of what they're spinning as a gaffe by Obama, but rather worse. The national tracking polls don't yet reflect the third debate, as they will on Sunday or Monday, but in the meantime North Dakota is now tied and Georgia is now down to six points, with early voting in the latter actually favoring Obama by a significant margin.
There will, of course, be widespread efforts to disenfranchise voters--there will be challenges, there will be court battles, There Will Be Drama. Which is why every Obama supporter in every state must, to borrow a phrase from the first Civil War back in the 1860s, "keep up the scare" on our opponents, taking friends to early voting where its taking place, and door-knocking and phone-banking whenever possible. But with each passing day, with each passing hour, Obama's lead in national polling, and in the key states he needs for victory, only grows more solid and subject to the dramatically unpredictable tactic-changes being carried out almost daily now, by the guy who still wants us to believe that he is the steady hand at the tiller.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
For McCain, An All-Day Hangover?
First, before I properly begin today's column, permit me to share with you the following two photographs, both of which were taken in the immediate aftermath of Wednesday evening's debate and neither of which have been altered or "photoshopped" in any way:
The video of these same moments is available on youtube and clearly shows Mr. McCain behaving strangely even for him, in a very specific way that had some folks in blogo-landia wondering if he'd been dosed with an exceptionally powerful stimulant (speed?) prior to the debate. This might almost be understandable, given the Senator from Arizona's age and frail physical health--but obviously it raises a brand-new festival of concerns regarding his capacity to govern if elected, and, inevitably, regarding that of his running-mate in a worst-case scenario, to boot. About the only thing saving Mr. McCain's bacon on this particular occasion is that essentially nobody was paying any attention, so relieved as we all were for the blood-letting up on the stage to finally be over.
It turns out that an improbably sizable 56.5 million people saw this final debate, a number that would have leveraged McCain's breakout potential with the electorate, if in fact he'd actually managed to cobble together a breakout. Instead the day's political coverage was dominated by the tidal wave of competing polling data showing that Mr. Obama won the contest decisively with persuadable voters, including one glee-inducing if also painfully awkward moment when Frank Luntz of Fox News turned to a room full of cherry-picked "undecided" voters to ask who'd carried the day, and found himself having to quickly terminate the discussion after the first four people in a row gave the nod to Team Blue.
What little of the political landscape that wasn't gobbled up with "Can McCain Come Back?" stories (and by the way, this just in--no), was dedicated instead to a series of medium-sized bomblets that each managed somehow to be even more damaging. And in what has become a familiar pattern this cycle, they started before most of us had even poured our second cup of coffee.
For reasons that might be easier to understand than they should be, the comely telecommunications lobbyist Vicky Iseman chose today to flatly deny that she and Senator McCain had been carrying-out an explicit affair aboard McCain's campaign jet during the primary campaigns. We could have wondered why, after no one had pressed the issue for months, Ms. Iseman would select this particular moment to go public with a denial of something that hadn't ever formally been asked, but then we'd be acting obtuse to wonder such a thing, now, wouldn't we.
Hey, at least Team Death-Star could plug its recently unveiled Campaign 7.0, featuring the scrappy and irascible Joe The Plumber, right? Well, actually, no. After a fifteen minutes of fame that seems to have lasted literally fifteen minutes, the ubiquitously mentioned Ohio citizen who spoke to Barack Obama several days ago about his plan to buy a business turns out not to have been vetted by McCain's campaign operatives (surprise, surprise). Among the many delightful tidbits we all learned today? That Mr. Wurzelbacher is a tax-cheat, that he isn't actually licensed to be a plumber in the state of Ohio (and mis-quoted the applicable law when pressed on the subject by a handful of intrepid reporters), that he isn't properly registered to vote, and that his first name isn't even actually Joe.
Best of all, because "Joe" is also a liar about his wherewithal to buy the plumbing business he's been coveting, a bit more research on the part of those same reporters revealed that his taxes would actually go down if Barack Obama were to go on and become President. Those of us who care enough about such an Orwellian outrage as was perpetrated on Wednesday night using this non-Joe the non-licensed non-plumber could theoretically start hitting the "contact us" links on every major news website in the land, demanding to know why this wasn't first-lead on every Thursday-evening network newscast, but hey: expecting a full exposure of this matter would be just nutty.
Meanwhile the supposed single strongest moment for McCain on the entire evening ("Senator Obama, if you wanted to run against George Bush you should have run four years ago"), was instantly spun into what is easily the most devastatingly effective Obama campaign commercial yet. After months of vague, muddled-message ads that were neither sufficiently focused nor sufficiently contrast-oriented, Team Blue has hit its stride in the air-war at the precise moment when its money advantage no longer need be divided between television and field office development. Mr. Obama is, according to another bombshell story that broke today, currently out-spending Mr. McCain on television advertisements by a jaw-dropping four-to-one margin, even before one considers the thirty minutes of uninterrupted network airtime he's booked for himself in the waning days of the election.
Clearly what Senator McCain needed was a campaign appearance or two in friendly and supportive confines, with a clear takeaway message, and a happy ending to his day. So what did he and his running mate do with that information? Old Man POW went, of all places, back to Pennsylvania, a state that has been comprehensively lost to him for weeks now. It's been noted in these columns before, but the only plausible explanation for the McCain/Palin ticket's stubborn insistence on this Sisyphean waste of time is that they can't continue to fundraise if they can't make a compelling argument for how they're going to assemble 270 electoral votes--and they can't get to 270 electoral votes without peeling the Keystone State's 21 away from the good guys. As for any other possible explanations, there don't actually seem to be any: Since at least the collapse of the bailout bill and maybe longer, McCain and Palin have been plotting a campaign map that, against any other possible standard of success, seems downright self-immolating.
At least it made sense to send Sarah Palin to North Carolina, thence to whip yet another crowd of supposedly pride-inducing mobsters into a feeding frenzy of open calls for injury to the Senator Obama himself. One small problem: Governor Palin only spoke for twenty minutes, less than half the time that was invested by Hank Williams, Jr. in warming-up the crowd, and conspicuously failed to mention to the crowd that early voting had begun in the state on this very day. And here we come to the biggest single indicator of just where this race stands.
If the only plausible theory behind McCain's implausible return to Pennsylvania was to justify continued donations, then the only plausible reason for Palin's failure to mention early voting in the Tar-Hell State is even more ominous: The fact that the speech would run on the local evening news meant that non-supporters of the ticket would see Governor Palin mention early voting, and go vote. It's not easy to over-emphasize the significance of this decision: The McCain/Palin ticket is so panic-stricken and desperate to hold on--in North Carolina!--that they'd rather omit the standard early-vote invocation to their supporters than risk the fact that everyone else in the state might learn about early voting from them. I'm no political expert, but that looks like a very, very bad sign for their prospects of keeping the state red, indeed.
Friday is always a slow news cycle (mercifully for McCain, in this case), though we'll know pretty soon--not yet, as these words were being written--just how the kiss-and-make-up session goes between Old Man Get-Off-My-Lawn, and David Letterman. The early word is that McCain told Letterman that he "screwed up," though it's not obvious which of the 1,367 instances he has it in mind to apologize for. Otherwise little further incoming is expected.
As for the slightly longer-term future of this race, if the early returns on Wednesday's debate are anything like accurate, we may expect another bounce for Barack Obama in the national tracking polls and the electoral map by Sunday or Monday, though in fairness a further bump of comparable magnitudes to the last two is probably unrealistic, given that Mr. Obama probably already has the support of just about every single American that he ever stood a more than hypothetical chance of getting.
...And the best part is, they're already voting. Not just in North Carolina, but in Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and other states as well--and they're turning out in unprecedented numbers, and, by all accounts, turning out overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. And in a day of unusually damaging news stories for McCain/Palin, that is easily the worst of the bunch.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
The video of these same moments is available on youtube and clearly shows Mr. McCain behaving strangely even for him, in a very specific way that had some folks in blogo-landia wondering if he'd been dosed with an exceptionally powerful stimulant (speed?) prior to the debate. This might almost be understandable, given the Senator from Arizona's age and frail physical health--but obviously it raises a brand-new festival of concerns regarding his capacity to govern if elected, and, inevitably, regarding that of his running-mate in a worst-case scenario, to boot. About the only thing saving Mr. McCain's bacon on this particular occasion is that essentially nobody was paying any attention, so relieved as we all were for the blood-letting up on the stage to finally be over.
It turns out that an improbably sizable 56.5 million people saw this final debate, a number that would have leveraged McCain's breakout potential with the electorate, if in fact he'd actually managed to cobble together a breakout. Instead the day's political coverage was dominated by the tidal wave of competing polling data showing that Mr. Obama won the contest decisively with persuadable voters, including one glee-inducing if also painfully awkward moment when Frank Luntz of Fox News turned to a room full of cherry-picked "undecided" voters to ask who'd carried the day, and found himself having to quickly terminate the discussion after the first four people in a row gave the nod to Team Blue.
What little of the political landscape that wasn't gobbled up with "Can McCain Come Back?" stories (and by the way, this just in--no), was dedicated instead to a series of medium-sized bomblets that each managed somehow to be even more damaging. And in what has become a familiar pattern this cycle, they started before most of us had even poured our second cup of coffee.
For reasons that might be easier to understand than they should be, the comely telecommunications lobbyist Vicky Iseman chose today to flatly deny that she and Senator McCain had been carrying-out an explicit affair aboard McCain's campaign jet during the primary campaigns. We could have wondered why, after no one had pressed the issue for months, Ms. Iseman would select this particular moment to go public with a denial of something that hadn't ever formally been asked, but then we'd be acting obtuse to wonder such a thing, now, wouldn't we.
Hey, at least Team Death-Star could plug its recently unveiled Campaign 7.0, featuring the scrappy and irascible Joe The Plumber, right? Well, actually, no. After a fifteen minutes of fame that seems to have lasted literally fifteen minutes, the ubiquitously mentioned Ohio citizen who spoke to Barack Obama several days ago about his plan to buy a business turns out not to have been vetted by McCain's campaign operatives (surprise, surprise). Among the many delightful tidbits we all learned today? That Mr. Wurzelbacher is a tax-cheat, that he isn't actually licensed to be a plumber in the state of Ohio (and mis-quoted the applicable law when pressed on the subject by a handful of intrepid reporters), that he isn't properly registered to vote, and that his first name isn't even actually Joe.
Best of all, because "Joe" is also a liar about his wherewithal to buy the plumbing business he's been coveting, a bit more research on the part of those same reporters revealed that his taxes would actually go down if Barack Obama were to go on and become President. Those of us who care enough about such an Orwellian outrage as was perpetrated on Wednesday night using this non-Joe the non-licensed non-plumber could theoretically start hitting the "contact us" links on every major news website in the land, demanding to know why this wasn't first-lead on every Thursday-evening network newscast, but hey: expecting a full exposure of this matter would be just nutty.
Meanwhile the supposed single strongest moment for McCain on the entire evening ("Senator Obama, if you wanted to run against George Bush you should have run four years ago"), was instantly spun into what is easily the most devastatingly effective Obama campaign commercial yet. After months of vague, muddled-message ads that were neither sufficiently focused nor sufficiently contrast-oriented, Team Blue has hit its stride in the air-war at the precise moment when its money advantage no longer need be divided between television and field office development. Mr. Obama is, according to another bombshell story that broke today, currently out-spending Mr. McCain on television advertisements by a jaw-dropping four-to-one margin, even before one considers the thirty minutes of uninterrupted network airtime he's booked for himself in the waning days of the election.
Clearly what Senator McCain needed was a campaign appearance or two in friendly and supportive confines, with a clear takeaway message, and a happy ending to his day. So what did he and his running mate do with that information? Old Man POW went, of all places, back to Pennsylvania, a state that has been comprehensively lost to him for weeks now. It's been noted in these columns before, but the only plausible explanation for the McCain/Palin ticket's stubborn insistence on this Sisyphean waste of time is that they can't continue to fundraise if they can't make a compelling argument for how they're going to assemble 270 electoral votes--and they can't get to 270 electoral votes without peeling the Keystone State's 21 away from the good guys. As for any other possible explanations, there don't actually seem to be any: Since at least the collapse of the bailout bill and maybe longer, McCain and Palin have been plotting a campaign map that, against any other possible standard of success, seems downright self-immolating.
At least it made sense to send Sarah Palin to North Carolina, thence to whip yet another crowd of supposedly pride-inducing mobsters into a feeding frenzy of open calls for injury to the Senator Obama himself. One small problem: Governor Palin only spoke for twenty minutes, less than half the time that was invested by Hank Williams, Jr. in warming-up the crowd, and conspicuously failed to mention to the crowd that early voting had begun in the state on this very day. And here we come to the biggest single indicator of just where this race stands.
If the only plausible theory behind McCain's implausible return to Pennsylvania was to justify continued donations, then the only plausible reason for Palin's failure to mention early voting in the Tar-Hell State is even more ominous: The fact that the speech would run on the local evening news meant that non-supporters of the ticket would see Governor Palin mention early voting, and go vote. It's not easy to over-emphasize the significance of this decision: The McCain/Palin ticket is so panic-stricken and desperate to hold on--in North Carolina!--that they'd rather omit the standard early-vote invocation to their supporters than risk the fact that everyone else in the state might learn about early voting from them. I'm no political expert, but that looks like a very, very bad sign for their prospects of keeping the state red, indeed.
Friday is always a slow news cycle (mercifully for McCain, in this case), though we'll know pretty soon--not yet, as these words were being written--just how the kiss-and-make-up session goes between Old Man Get-Off-My-Lawn, and David Letterman. The early word is that McCain told Letterman that he "screwed up," though it's not obvious which of the 1,367 instances he has it in mind to apologize for. Otherwise little further incoming is expected.
As for the slightly longer-term future of this race, if the early returns on Wednesday's debate are anything like accurate, we may expect another bounce for Barack Obama in the national tracking polls and the electoral map by Sunday or Monday, though in fairness a further bump of comparable magnitudes to the last two is probably unrealistic, given that Mr. Obama probably already has the support of just about every single American that he ever stood a more than hypothetical chance of getting.
...And the best part is, they're already voting. Not just in North Carolina, but in Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and other states as well--and they're turning out in unprecedented numbers, and, by all accounts, turning out overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. And in a day of unusually damaging news stories for McCain/Palin, that is easily the worst of the bunch.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
So That's Election 2008?
The handwriting is on the wall--all over the wall, if it comes to that--for John McCain and that venom-spewing monster on his undercard whom I won't even dignify this morning with a name: They're going to get clobbered in this election, and they probably know it.
Today's installment of fun facts:
1) McCain's debate performance was the worst yet. The mainstream media was charmed at the prospect of keeping things artificially close, and so they've been spinning the story McCain's way, but this year the persuadable middle isn't quite so receptive to manipulation from the mainstream media. In the various instant polls conducted after the event, notably those by CNN and CBS, the general public saw a completely different event from the one the media analysts wanted them to see, and awarded the victory to Obama by 2:1 margins.
Many web-based colunists are calling attention to a moment about twenty-five minutes in, when McCain attempted the most spectacular feat of Orwellian big-lie doublespeak yet, by endeavoring to blame the negative tone of the contest on Barack Obama. After that, so sayeth those who had access to the opinion dials, the viewing public effectively gave up on John McCain for good. You can manipulate people's opinions in an election, yes--but only if they haven't already been set in concrete. Afterward your efforts only make you look manipulative.
2) Early voting is presaging a coast-to-coast Obama landslide. A recent article on fivethirtyeight.com follows the early returns in five states that voted for Bush in 2004 -- Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Georgia, and finds Barack Obama significantly out-performing his own statewide polling, with respect to those who've already voted. In Georgia in particular, the canary has not just fallen off its perch but has started to decompose into the newspaper on the bottom of the cage: Whereas the Land-of-Lincolner supposedly trails Mr. McCain in the State of Adventure by eleven points, the tally of banked early votes actually favors him by five percent--a difference of plus-sixteen, or about the same as his overall lead in the national track. Moreover, almost twenty percent of the Georgia electorate has already voted--and of those, a historically high percentage are African American.
3) The senior vote is abandoning the Republicans. Despite Obama's relatively gentle push to win-over this demographic, seniors in large numbers are migrating to Team Blue of their own accord, notably because of the recent downside moves in their 401(k) balances. As has been mentioned in previous installments of this column, Florida Governor Charlie Crist recently ducked a question about appearing with McCain--claiming that the business of running the state had to take precedence--and was later seen at Disneyworld during the McCain event in question. It's a tautology, but it bears repeating: Tea, Crankypants cannot win the White House without holding Florida, and right now their prospects of holding Florida are so bleak that a Governor from his own party doesn't want to be seen on the same stage with their candidate.
4) The mainstream media is (last night notwithstanding) pivoting the story. Political comebacks are unlike sports comebacks, in that the audience gets to decide whether they'll be successful or not--and the big assist in that department goes to an electronic press that wanted, for a very long time, to hold this thing artificially close. Now the editorial boards of the major news outlets have recently turned-tail and raced across the spectrum to the "can the Republican Party survive?" extreme, presumably out of fear that they will seem outdated and obsolete, which of course they are. Two pre-debate stories earlier this week have shown this change better than any others: Palin's response to Limbaugh's query about her immediate future ("That's a good question"), and the pre-debate analysis itself ("McCain's Last Stand?").
5) The Obama campaign's air-war is peaking at just the right moment. This morning they released their first post-debate commercial, and it's easily their most effective (and funniest) yet. Team-McCain's response ad this morning is a self-parodying microcosm of their inexplicably inept campaign style. Throw it all out there, including a bizarre pledge to change everything in Washington, and hope that something, somewhere in there, sticks.
Add all of this up and, for the first time in a long time, it's good to be a Democrat.
Still there is much work to be done to ensure that Mr. Obama's win is clean, decisive, and sufficiently gracious. None of us wants a repeat of the off-on-the-wrong-foot circus we had when Clinton & Clinton moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and between then and now the threat of electoral disenfranchisement is as large and pressing as it's ever been in modern history, what with the trailing team using its stump speeches to brand the leading team as socialist, terrorist-sympathizing Muslims who will appoint crooked Chicago precinct bosses in charge of federal departments and legislate defeat in the war on terror.
Already we're seeing the first ominous signs of what surely must be a concerted and nationwide effort to intimidate African-American voters, with the publication of a recent e-mail sent to Republican volunteers in Milwaukee. "I am interested in names of Milwaukee area veterans, policemen, security personnel, firefighters etc.," wrote Jonathan Waclawski, director of the Wisconsin Republican Party's election-day operations. "If you have any connections with such organizations, please pass that information on."
...I don't know about you, but I'm guessing that Mr. Wacalwski isn't looking for firefighters because he expects trash cans to be set ablaze inside inner-city polling places.
On a certain level it would be difficult to blame these folks, since only outright theft can get him the White House, now. Which means it will fall to us--all of us, working our hearts out for Barack Obama and Joe Biden low these many months--to redouble our efforts, not get complacent, and turn out ever vote we can.
On a broader front, conservatives opinion-makers are gearing-up to vilify Mr. Obama as a flatly unacceptable President even before he actually becomes President--with radio talk show hosts pressing the most obvious buttons to set minds against the man before he can exercise any of what should have been a decisive mandate. And yes, the fact that there are still people who would vilify a President for seeking more oversight of the financial markets is a commentary on our national consciousness far more disheartening than anything Limbaugh or Ingrham have actually said. But the fact that they're doing it means that Mr. Obama and company will have to be doubly-vigilant to the risk of getting things off to a slow start next January.
The good news on this score is that there seems to be some significant movement in the wider audience, and it doesn't seem to be favorable to more of the same fire-fanning nonsense from the right. The Bill Ayers stuff already hasn't worked, and the socialist stuff doesn't seem to have much traction with folks who might soon be willing to try a little socialism, even if that's what Mr. Obama actually wanted.
As for the tired Republican saw about self-empowerment, it seems that an Obama victory would afford just the sort of social validation to all those Horatio Algier stories we keep hearing from Republicans in lieu of support for legitimate public assistance. If the recipients of this assistance can watch the evening news every night and see six minutes' worth of coverage of the single -greatest living example of a Horatio Algier story in modern history, shouldn't we expect just the sorts of increased initiative and self-motivation from those recipients, that Republicans have been telling us should fix the problem? And if the answer is yes, then might some of us in the rank-and-file experiment with trying this pitch on our persuadable friends in the anti-assistance wing of our own social sets? And what of tone--should we act as if we might still lose by one vote, or as if an Obama Presidency is something we can start looking forward to?
Ironically, it would seem that one of the most productive things that Democrats can do right now to help their candidate, is to exude confidence. Typically this is supposed to be deadly to an election campaign because of its capacity to remove urgency from fellow Democrats who are on the fence about voting, but this time around that doesn't seem to apply--precisely because there don't seem to be any Democrats who are on the fence about voting. Instead, by expressing satisfaction with the accuracy and stability of the current batch of polling data, we on the left have the chance to set up a national expectation so imbalnaced in Mr. Obama's favor that efforts by the extreme right-wing to rob the public of its voice will no longer be tolerated. Moreover, higher levels of confidence on our side would also seem likely to discourage voters on the other side--people who, let's face it, probably have quite a bit to be discouraged about, anyway.
Team Blue must of course secure their GOTV effort in real, tangible results at the polls (though there would seem at this point to be little doubt on this score), and the contest must afford us no major surprises to continue on its current trajectory, but with each passing hour the wiggle-room for McCain and Palin to wrest this contest from them without fraud diminishes geometrically. Already there are poll analyses describing McCain's task as that of winning every remaining undecided voter, every soft Obama supporter, and even a few strong Obama supporters, without also setting his own base on fire by praising pro-choice Justices on the Supreme Court (like he did last night). Not gonna happen, folks.
Which leaves that surprise. But here the news media are really, genuinely missing a chance to provide meaningful analysis, and here the charge of laziness is no excuse: The old saying in political news coverage--the one you are sure to hear a thousand times between now and November 4th, that "a week is forever in politics"--isn't explicitly accurate; it turns out to make a huge difference when that week is. During the summer months, the old saw is probably true, but in the waning days of an election the public tends to "lock in" their choice, requiring larger and larger external stimuli to change their minds. No candidate in the history of tracking polls has ever closed the margin McCain now faces, in the time he now has.
If that's an unpleasant reality for the McCain/Palin ticket, the rest of us surely do ourselves no favors by describing the race as still imminently changeable. Because, let's face it on this glorious Thursday morning-in-America: this race isn't still imminently changeable. Probably hasn't been for a while, now.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Today's installment of fun facts:
1) McCain's debate performance was the worst yet. The mainstream media was charmed at the prospect of keeping things artificially close, and so they've been spinning the story McCain's way, but this year the persuadable middle isn't quite so receptive to manipulation from the mainstream media. In the various instant polls conducted after the event, notably those by CNN and CBS, the general public saw a completely different event from the one the media analysts wanted them to see, and awarded the victory to Obama by 2:1 margins.
Many web-based colunists are calling attention to a moment about twenty-five minutes in, when McCain attempted the most spectacular feat of Orwellian big-lie doublespeak yet, by endeavoring to blame the negative tone of the contest on Barack Obama. After that, so sayeth those who had access to the opinion dials, the viewing public effectively gave up on John McCain for good. You can manipulate people's opinions in an election, yes--but only if they haven't already been set in concrete. Afterward your efforts only make you look manipulative.
2) Early voting is presaging a coast-to-coast Obama landslide. A recent article on fivethirtyeight.com follows the early returns in five states that voted for Bush in 2004 -- Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Georgia, and finds Barack Obama significantly out-performing his own statewide polling, with respect to those who've already voted. In Georgia in particular, the canary has not just fallen off its perch but has started to decompose into the newspaper on the bottom of the cage: Whereas the Land-of-Lincolner supposedly trails Mr. McCain in the State of Adventure by eleven points, the tally of banked early votes actually favors him by five percent--a difference of plus-sixteen, or about the same as his overall lead in the national track. Moreover, almost twenty percent of the Georgia electorate has already voted--and of those, a historically high percentage are African American.
3) The senior vote is abandoning the Republicans. Despite Obama's relatively gentle push to win-over this demographic, seniors in large numbers are migrating to Team Blue of their own accord, notably because of the recent downside moves in their 401(k) balances. As has been mentioned in previous installments of this column, Florida Governor Charlie Crist recently ducked a question about appearing with McCain--claiming that the business of running the state had to take precedence--and was later seen at Disneyworld during the McCain event in question. It's a tautology, but it bears repeating: Tea, Crankypants cannot win the White House without holding Florida, and right now their prospects of holding Florida are so bleak that a Governor from his own party doesn't want to be seen on the same stage with their candidate.
4) The mainstream media is (last night notwithstanding) pivoting the story. Political comebacks are unlike sports comebacks, in that the audience gets to decide whether they'll be successful or not--and the big assist in that department goes to an electronic press that wanted, for a very long time, to hold this thing artificially close. Now the editorial boards of the major news outlets have recently turned-tail and raced across the spectrum to the "can the Republican Party survive?" extreme, presumably out of fear that they will seem outdated and obsolete, which of course they are. Two pre-debate stories earlier this week have shown this change better than any others: Palin's response to Limbaugh's query about her immediate future ("That's a good question"), and the pre-debate analysis itself ("McCain's Last Stand?").
5) The Obama campaign's air-war is peaking at just the right moment. This morning they released their first post-debate commercial, and it's easily their most effective (and funniest) yet. Team-McCain's response ad this morning is a self-parodying microcosm of their inexplicably inept campaign style. Throw it all out there, including a bizarre pledge to change everything in Washington, and hope that something, somewhere in there, sticks.
Add all of this up and, for the first time in a long time, it's good to be a Democrat.
Still there is much work to be done to ensure that Mr. Obama's win is clean, decisive, and sufficiently gracious. None of us wants a repeat of the off-on-the-wrong-foot circus we had when Clinton & Clinton moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and between then and now the threat of electoral disenfranchisement is as large and pressing as it's ever been in modern history, what with the trailing team using its stump speeches to brand the leading team as socialist, terrorist-sympathizing Muslims who will appoint crooked Chicago precinct bosses in charge of federal departments and legislate defeat in the war on terror.
Already we're seeing the first ominous signs of what surely must be a concerted and nationwide effort to intimidate African-American voters, with the publication of a recent e-mail sent to Republican volunteers in Milwaukee. "I am interested in names of Milwaukee area veterans, policemen, security personnel, firefighters etc.," wrote Jonathan Waclawski, director of the Wisconsin Republican Party's election-day operations. "If you have any connections with such organizations, please pass that information on."
...I don't know about you, but I'm guessing that Mr. Wacalwski isn't looking for firefighters because he expects trash cans to be set ablaze inside inner-city polling places.
On a certain level it would be difficult to blame these folks, since only outright theft can get him the White House, now. Which means it will fall to us--all of us, working our hearts out for Barack Obama and Joe Biden low these many months--to redouble our efforts, not get complacent, and turn out ever vote we can.
On a broader front, conservatives opinion-makers are gearing-up to vilify Mr. Obama as a flatly unacceptable President even before he actually becomes President--with radio talk show hosts pressing the most obvious buttons to set minds against the man before he can exercise any of what should have been a decisive mandate. And yes, the fact that there are still people who would vilify a President for seeking more oversight of the financial markets is a commentary on our national consciousness far more disheartening than anything Limbaugh or Ingrham have actually said. But the fact that they're doing it means that Mr. Obama and company will have to be doubly-vigilant to the risk of getting things off to a slow start next January.
The good news on this score is that there seems to be some significant movement in the wider audience, and it doesn't seem to be favorable to more of the same fire-fanning nonsense from the right. The Bill Ayers stuff already hasn't worked, and the socialist stuff doesn't seem to have much traction with folks who might soon be willing to try a little socialism, even if that's what Mr. Obama actually wanted.
As for the tired Republican saw about self-empowerment, it seems that an Obama victory would afford just the sort of social validation to all those Horatio Algier stories we keep hearing from Republicans in lieu of support for legitimate public assistance. If the recipients of this assistance can watch the evening news every night and see six minutes' worth of coverage of the single -greatest living example of a Horatio Algier story in modern history, shouldn't we expect just the sorts of increased initiative and self-motivation from those recipients, that Republicans have been telling us should fix the problem? And if the answer is yes, then might some of us in the rank-and-file experiment with trying this pitch on our persuadable friends in the anti-assistance wing of our own social sets? And what of tone--should we act as if we might still lose by one vote, or as if an Obama Presidency is something we can start looking forward to?
Ironically, it would seem that one of the most productive things that Democrats can do right now to help their candidate, is to exude confidence. Typically this is supposed to be deadly to an election campaign because of its capacity to remove urgency from fellow Democrats who are on the fence about voting, but this time around that doesn't seem to apply--precisely because there don't seem to be any Democrats who are on the fence about voting. Instead, by expressing satisfaction with the accuracy and stability of the current batch of polling data, we on the left have the chance to set up a national expectation so imbalnaced in Mr. Obama's favor that efforts by the extreme right-wing to rob the public of its voice will no longer be tolerated. Moreover, higher levels of confidence on our side would also seem likely to discourage voters on the other side--people who, let's face it, probably have quite a bit to be discouraged about, anyway.
Team Blue must of course secure their GOTV effort in real, tangible results at the polls (though there would seem at this point to be little doubt on this score), and the contest must afford us no major surprises to continue on its current trajectory, but with each passing hour the wiggle-room for McCain and Palin to wrest this contest from them without fraud diminishes geometrically. Already there are poll analyses describing McCain's task as that of winning every remaining undecided voter, every soft Obama supporter, and even a few strong Obama supporters, without also setting his own base on fire by praising pro-choice Justices on the Supreme Court (like he did last night). Not gonna happen, folks.
Which leaves that surprise. But here the news media are really, genuinely missing a chance to provide meaningful analysis, and here the charge of laziness is no excuse: The old saying in political news coverage--the one you are sure to hear a thousand times between now and November 4th, that "a week is forever in politics"--isn't explicitly accurate; it turns out to make a huge difference when that week is. During the summer months, the old saw is probably true, but in the waning days of an election the public tends to "lock in" their choice, requiring larger and larger external stimuli to change their minds. No candidate in the history of tracking polls has ever closed the margin McCain now faces, in the time he now has.
If that's an unpleasant reality for the McCain/Palin ticket, the rest of us surely do ourselves no favors by describing the race as still imminently changeable. Because, let's face it on this glorious Thursday morning-in-America: this race isn't still imminently changeable. Probably hasn't been for a while, now.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Live-Blogging The Debate (Hit Refresh to Update)
FINAL THOUGHTS: BIG KNOCKOUT PUNCH, but for the wrong guy.
10:31PM - Obama's got this thing completely by the tail, here. Completely.
10:30PM - Obama getting to go last is a huge moment, too, because by tomorrow that could well be all that anyone (who's still watching) remembers. He's emoting, he's connecting with the audience, and he MEANS it.
10:29PM - McCain would be coming up with a halfway decent closing statement, except that he's not running as a Democrat. And the "trust us" line is going to be parsed for exactly what it was, yet another "spooky boogeyman" line.
10:28PM - "My friends" is how McCain opens his closing statement? We need a new direction?
10:26PM - How many times tonight has McCain interrupted Obama, and how many times has Obama interrupted McCain? And the voucher pivot on the seats in DC, is great.
10:25PM - I don't know about anyone else, but this event can't be over soon enough for me -- Sarah Palin is going to do something to fix Autism, okay. I got it.
10:23PM - Obama's answer about "interest groups" is another amazing moment in this debate, and Obama has had a lot of them. How many has McCain had tonight? Enough to turn this entire. ten-point margin around? Well, he's still got seven minutes.
10:21PM - I'm sure McCain's answer on the education question was... well... interesting -- but nobody here in my room heard the first word of it because we've stopped caring what McCain thinks or says about ANYTHING. If that's happening in a politico-junkie room like this one, I have to believe that he's lost a lot of people out there with this performance tonight.
10:18PM - Education really is the number-one issue in this country, folks - and if you're sitting at the other end of this blog thinking "you're only saying that because you're a teacher," then let me offer the friendly amendment that I've got a front-row seat on what's been happening, too. And it's not good. Obama starts with a pro-NEA answer, and wraps it up with a great punch-line about... wait for it... turning off the fucking TV.
10:16PM - Did McCain just use air quotes on the subject of protecting the health of the mother in a complicated late-term pregnancy???
10:14PM - No exception for the mother's health and life is a good line, but he still voted "present" and, at this moment, looks more like John Kerry than a President running for reelection. And what happens? McCain lets him completely off the hook by sitting there huffing and puffing.
10:12PM - It's true that Obama voted "present" a great many times in the Illinois Legislature and I thought the Republicans would hit Obama over the head with those votes all summer and fall -- the fact that they didn't is pretty astonishing to me. Obama's got a great pivot and delivered it perfectly: "It's because. It's. Not true."
10:11PM - I just looked up and said, "Obama looks like he's running for RE-election as President," and everyone in the room -- everyone, both stripes -- blurted out "YEAH!" all at once.
10:09PM - Obama looking like The President, again. How ironic that Obama is the guy who looks so much more Presidential, and McCain looks so "unsteady at the tiller." Obama shows that he's unafraid to tread on the abortion stuff, which will cost him a vote or two in the persuadable middle but makes him look a lot tougher than a patented, John Kerry, weenie-type answer.
10:08PM - A friend of mine just leaned over and pointed out that McCain just set the entire base on fire, once again, with his pledge to be neutral on the judiciary--and the only people who are impressed with his answer are people who aren't going to vote for him, anyway.
10:07PM - Will Roe v. Wade play with anyone? I don't think so -- the only people it would have, already know about Obama's "above my pay-grade" answer from Saddleback.
10:06PM - Obama will not let McCain get away with trying to put the fine back into Obama's mouth, and the USCofC endorsement is a great pivot.
10:05PM - Did McCain just say that Joe would pay a fine under Obama's plan, a minute and a half after Obama said that Joe WOULDN'T? Gosh, you know, I almost feel sorry for the old coot, at this point.
10:04PM - McCain's $5000 really does come from taxed health-care benefits, it really, really, really does - and if McCain says it doesn't, the mainstream media is going to pounce all over it.
10:02PM - Obama has said repeatedly that the small businesses don't have to pay the fine, and McCain was too pissed off at the last debate to listen. That little moment right there, folks, is your 2008 Presidential Election, period.
10:00PM - Putting health-care records on line isn't going to play, and the physical fitness stuff isn't going to get funded. Obama's going to leap all over the $5000 credit, and by the way, Joe The Plumber just turned into a drinking game, at least in my room.
9:58PM - Obama talking about health care is a can't-lose for us, precisely because none of the usual knocks against blue-state health care plans actually apply to Senator Obama's plan.
9:55PM - We're back to "without preconditions" again? The whole "I just recited to you" line got an ENORMOUS howl from the entire room the entire room, even the Republicans, since it suggested that Obama had the temerity to listen to McCain's summary of pro-Columbia points and still had his own opinion.
9:53PM - Obama is on shaky footing with the "I understand it pretty well" line, but once again McCain's reaction is the only thing people will remember tomorrow. Oh, by the way, Obama's pivot to Peru and energy and cars is winding McCain up like a watch. Will there be anyone left in the country who isn't at least a little bit afraid of McCain, by the time this evening's event is over.
9:52PM - McCain is over-playing the drilling thing, but I forgive him for that because it's all those guys have. His answer on Columbia is more Presidential, but is anyone still watching?
9:51PM - Obama is getting a lot of traction on the free trade issue. And Ohio is watching.
9:49PM - No percentage, from McCain. Obama will play it conservatively but he doesn't want to commit himself to something that could be used against him in four years. The "borrow seven-hundred billion dollars from China and send it to Saudi Arabia" is a great line, because that's exactly what we're doing. He sounds Presidential (with plenty of "uh's" thrown in), but he's really closing the deal. NAFTA should be a vote-getter for Obama in Ohio.
9:47PM - A specific number for the percentage of our dependence on oil? McCain wants to eliminate our dependence on oil in four years? Wow.
9:45PM - Did the universe just trade places with another one I've never seen before? There's a united Iraq right now?
9:44PM - "That's gonna be up to the American people" is another great answer by Obama. He's hitting this just right.
9:43PM - She's a reformer? Sarah Palin is a reformer? Has John McCain been cryogenically frozen for the past week, while the rest of us have been reading the Troopergate report?
9:42PM - Will McCain say "Joe the plumber" again???
9:40PM - Hey, did I say that our moderator had a right-wing bias? Apparently not a Sarah Palin fan, is Bob. Will Obama take the bait? No, he'll use the chance to say great things about Joe Biden and not say a word about Sarah Palin. Perfect.
9:39PM - McCain is going down in flames here, folks.
9:38PM - Obama's "who I associate with" line is terrific because it makes him look so Presidential, plus the whole "says more about your campaign than it does about me" is a terrific zinger.
937PM - Obama is going to bury this Ayers thing, and McCain is really going to regret this deal he made with his right flank, since Obama is going to handle it so well.
9:35PM - Obama sensed that the public was getting sick of this particular argument, and pivots expertly--he knew exactly when was the right instant to stop pressing it, to avoid looking passive on the one hand, and beating a dead horse on the other. And how does McCain respond? With the Ayers thing and the ACORN thing--but Obama's facial expression tells me he's completely ready for it.
9:34PM - Is John McCain going to actually stand up and start screaming, right in the middle of this event? He's proud of those people who shouted "kill him"? No, wait, here's a news-flash, he's going to obfuscate the question of who shouted what, and what kind of hat they were wearing.
9:33PM - Obama isn't afraid to say "Kill him" which is a great moment on the night, and will score huge points. The fact that Obama is going straight to the heart of the matter instead of dodging it the way, oh, I dunno, John Kerry might have.
9:31PM - I really don't think McCain is going to win the "who's negative" contest. People don't want to hear this from the guy who said that his opponent wants to teach sex-ed to kindergarteners.
9:28PM - 100% of his ads have been negative is a great line because it gets people scouring McCain's ads, looking for one that isn't negative -- and there aren't any. Obama is nailing this town-hall thing, too, which is preposterous. For McCain to use the town-hall debates as his excuse to run slam-ads is really outrageous.
9:27PM - McCain is going to make Obama out to be the bad guy in this campaign? That's not going to play -- and besides he hasn't said "Bill Ayers" one single time. He's playing to catch Obama off-balance, but that's not going to work because Obama isn't going to be off-balance.
9:26PM - Moderator brings up the Ayers thing. A move that won't win *HIM* any new votes, but I guess we have to live with it. All eyes are on McCain, and what does he do? Compare himself to Barry Goldwater? And his opponent to Kennedy?
9:25PM - McCain is going to break the rules, talk over the moderator, and, truly, none of it is making him any votes. He looks really bad, tonight. Really. Bad.
9:23PM - Obama was totally ready for the "name one instance" business, and then re-loads on this $42,000 thing, though I wish he hadn't used the word "disputed" when he meant "discredited."
9:22PM - If I were Obama, I'd be inclined to let McCain just keep right on talking.
9:20PM - I had a pretty-big computer lock-up (long story short), but in the meantime McCain has truly flailed on the question of what would he cut. His answer went on a long time and didn't answer the question. Now he's going on with this $42k tax-hike, which has already been completely debunked.
9:14PM - Our moderator is slanting this thing in a conservative direction but that's to be expected; he's a conservative. It's a replay of his partisanship in '04, but I'm sure the Obama people are ready for it.
9:11PM - McCain is hitting on some old buzz-phrases and some old hot-button themes, and they're going to ring hollow given the current state of the economy. Obama is trying to thread a needle here, but it's McCain who's looking out of touch.
9:10PM - I know we're just getting started, here, and it's dangerous to say too much too soon, but at the moment this whole affair is looking like McCain's worst night. It's almost painful, to watch this.
9:09PM - Did McCain just say "fifty percent of small business income is paid by small business?"
9:07PM - As in both previous debates, Obama starts out a little uneven -- dare I say, a little nervous? -- but McCain bails him out of it by looking positively WEIRD, sitting next to him. I've never seen him look this creepy, and that's saying something.
9:05PM - McCain repeats his pledge to take all the junk off of private bank balance sheets and transfer it to the government. The conservatives don't like this idea (not just Secretary Paulson), and if McCain is reaching for his "Mavericky" image of days gone by, this is a terrible issue to do it with, precisely because he'll actually shed voters from his right flank.
9:03PM - McCain looks bizarre tonight, what's with those wide-open eyes? I don't remember that from the first two debates (though, to be fair, I do remember the rambling).
9:01PM - ROUND ZERO GOES TO...
Once again, McCain looks very reluctant to be there -- which would make this three out of three. Click Here to Read More...
10:31PM - Obama's got this thing completely by the tail, here. Completely.
10:30PM - Obama getting to go last is a huge moment, too, because by tomorrow that could well be all that anyone (who's still watching) remembers. He's emoting, he's connecting with the audience, and he MEANS it.
10:29PM - McCain would be coming up with a halfway decent closing statement, except that he's not running as a Democrat. And the "trust us" line is going to be parsed for exactly what it was, yet another "spooky boogeyman" line.
10:28PM - "My friends" is how McCain opens his closing statement? We need a new direction?
10:26PM - How many times tonight has McCain interrupted Obama, and how many times has Obama interrupted McCain? And the voucher pivot on the seats in DC, is great.
10:25PM - I don't know about anyone else, but this event can't be over soon enough for me -- Sarah Palin is going to do something to fix Autism, okay. I got it.
10:23PM - Obama's answer about "interest groups" is another amazing moment in this debate, and Obama has had a lot of them. How many has McCain had tonight? Enough to turn this entire. ten-point margin around? Well, he's still got seven minutes.
10:21PM - I'm sure McCain's answer on the education question was... well... interesting -- but nobody here in my room heard the first word of it because we've stopped caring what McCain thinks or says about ANYTHING. If that's happening in a politico-junkie room like this one, I have to believe that he's lost a lot of people out there with this performance tonight.
10:18PM - Education really is the number-one issue in this country, folks - and if you're sitting at the other end of this blog thinking "you're only saying that because you're a teacher," then let me offer the friendly amendment that I've got a front-row seat on what's been happening, too. And it's not good. Obama starts with a pro-NEA answer, and wraps it up with a great punch-line about... wait for it... turning off the fucking TV.
10:16PM - Did McCain just use air quotes on the subject of protecting the health of the mother in a complicated late-term pregnancy???
10:14PM - No exception for the mother's health and life is a good line, but he still voted "present" and, at this moment, looks more like John Kerry than a President running for reelection. And what happens? McCain lets him completely off the hook by sitting there huffing and puffing.
10:12PM - It's true that Obama voted "present" a great many times in the Illinois Legislature and I thought the Republicans would hit Obama over the head with those votes all summer and fall -- the fact that they didn't is pretty astonishing to me. Obama's got a great pivot and delivered it perfectly: "It's because. It's. Not true."
10:11PM - I just looked up and said, "Obama looks like he's running for RE-election as President," and everyone in the room -- everyone, both stripes -- blurted out "YEAH!" all at once.
10:09PM - Obama looking like The President, again. How ironic that Obama is the guy who looks so much more Presidential, and McCain looks so "unsteady at the tiller." Obama shows that he's unafraid to tread on the abortion stuff, which will cost him a vote or two in the persuadable middle but makes him look a lot tougher than a patented, John Kerry, weenie-type answer.
10:08PM - A friend of mine just leaned over and pointed out that McCain just set the entire base on fire, once again, with his pledge to be neutral on the judiciary--and the only people who are impressed with his answer are people who aren't going to vote for him, anyway.
10:07PM - Will Roe v. Wade play with anyone? I don't think so -- the only people it would have, already know about Obama's "above my pay-grade" answer from Saddleback.
10:06PM - Obama will not let McCain get away with trying to put the fine back into Obama's mouth, and the USCofC endorsement is a great pivot.
10:05PM - Did McCain just say that Joe would pay a fine under Obama's plan, a minute and a half after Obama said that Joe WOULDN'T? Gosh, you know, I almost feel sorry for the old coot, at this point.
10:04PM - McCain's $5000 really does come from taxed health-care benefits, it really, really, really does - and if McCain says it doesn't, the mainstream media is going to pounce all over it.
10:02PM - Obama has said repeatedly that the small businesses don't have to pay the fine, and McCain was too pissed off at the last debate to listen. That little moment right there, folks, is your 2008 Presidential Election, period.
10:00PM - Putting health-care records on line isn't going to play, and the physical fitness stuff isn't going to get funded. Obama's going to leap all over the $5000 credit, and by the way, Joe The Plumber just turned into a drinking game, at least in my room.
9:58PM - Obama talking about health care is a can't-lose for us, precisely because none of the usual knocks against blue-state health care plans actually apply to Senator Obama's plan.
9:55PM - We're back to "without preconditions" again? The whole "I just recited to you" line got an ENORMOUS howl from the entire room the entire room, even the Republicans, since it suggested that Obama had the temerity to listen to McCain's summary of pro-Columbia points and still had his own opinion.
9:53PM - Obama is on shaky footing with the "I understand it pretty well" line, but once again McCain's reaction is the only thing people will remember tomorrow. Oh, by the way, Obama's pivot to Peru and energy and cars is winding McCain up like a watch. Will there be anyone left in the country who isn't at least a little bit afraid of McCain, by the time this evening's event is over.
9:52PM - McCain is over-playing the drilling thing, but I forgive him for that because it's all those guys have. His answer on Columbia is more Presidential, but is anyone still watching?
9:51PM - Obama is getting a lot of traction on the free trade issue. And Ohio is watching.
9:49PM - No percentage, from McCain. Obama will play it conservatively but he doesn't want to commit himself to something that could be used against him in four years. The "borrow seven-hundred billion dollars from China and send it to Saudi Arabia" is a great line, because that's exactly what we're doing. He sounds Presidential (with plenty of "uh's" thrown in), but he's really closing the deal. NAFTA should be a vote-getter for Obama in Ohio.
9:47PM - A specific number for the percentage of our dependence on oil? McCain wants to eliminate our dependence on oil in four years? Wow.
9:45PM - Did the universe just trade places with another one I've never seen before? There's a united Iraq right now?
9:44PM - "That's gonna be up to the American people" is another great answer by Obama. He's hitting this just right.
9:43PM - She's a reformer? Sarah Palin is a reformer? Has John McCain been cryogenically frozen for the past week, while the rest of us have been reading the Troopergate report?
9:42PM - Will McCain say "Joe the plumber" again???
9:40PM - Hey, did I say that our moderator had a right-wing bias? Apparently not a Sarah Palin fan, is Bob. Will Obama take the bait? No, he'll use the chance to say great things about Joe Biden and not say a word about Sarah Palin. Perfect.
9:39PM - McCain is going down in flames here, folks.
9:38PM - Obama's "who I associate with" line is terrific because it makes him look so Presidential, plus the whole "says more about your campaign than it does about me" is a terrific zinger.
937PM - Obama is going to bury this Ayers thing, and McCain is really going to regret this deal he made with his right flank, since Obama is going to handle it so well.
9:35PM - Obama sensed that the public was getting sick of this particular argument, and pivots expertly--he knew exactly when was the right instant to stop pressing it, to avoid looking passive on the one hand, and beating a dead horse on the other. And how does McCain respond? With the Ayers thing and the ACORN thing--but Obama's facial expression tells me he's completely ready for it.
9:34PM - Is John McCain going to actually stand up and start screaming, right in the middle of this event? He's proud of those people who shouted "kill him"? No, wait, here's a news-flash, he's going to obfuscate the question of who shouted what, and what kind of hat they were wearing.
9:33PM - Obama isn't afraid to say "Kill him" which is a great moment on the night, and will score huge points. The fact that Obama is going straight to the heart of the matter instead of dodging it the way, oh, I dunno, John Kerry might have.
9:31PM - I really don't think McCain is going to win the "who's negative" contest. People don't want to hear this from the guy who said that his opponent wants to teach sex-ed to kindergarteners.
9:28PM - 100% of his ads have been negative is a great line because it gets people scouring McCain's ads, looking for one that isn't negative -- and there aren't any. Obama is nailing this town-hall thing, too, which is preposterous. For McCain to use the town-hall debates as his excuse to run slam-ads is really outrageous.
9:27PM - McCain is going to make Obama out to be the bad guy in this campaign? That's not going to play -- and besides he hasn't said "Bill Ayers" one single time. He's playing to catch Obama off-balance, but that's not going to work because Obama isn't going to be off-balance.
9:26PM - Moderator brings up the Ayers thing. A move that won't win *HIM* any new votes, but I guess we have to live with it. All eyes are on McCain, and what does he do? Compare himself to Barry Goldwater? And his opponent to Kennedy?
9:25PM - McCain is going to break the rules, talk over the moderator, and, truly, none of it is making him any votes. He looks really bad, tonight. Really. Bad.
9:23PM - Obama was totally ready for the "name one instance" business, and then re-loads on this $42,000 thing, though I wish he hadn't used the word "disputed" when he meant "discredited."
9:22PM - If I were Obama, I'd be inclined to let McCain just keep right on talking.
9:20PM - I had a pretty-big computer lock-up (long story short), but in the meantime McCain has truly flailed on the question of what would he cut. His answer went on a long time and didn't answer the question. Now he's going on with this $42k tax-hike, which has already been completely debunked.
9:14PM - Our moderator is slanting this thing in a conservative direction but that's to be expected; he's a conservative. It's a replay of his partisanship in '04, but I'm sure the Obama people are ready for it.
9:11PM - McCain is hitting on some old buzz-phrases and some old hot-button themes, and they're going to ring hollow given the current state of the economy. Obama is trying to thread a needle here, but it's McCain who's looking out of touch.
9:10PM - I know we're just getting started, here, and it's dangerous to say too much too soon, but at the moment this whole affair is looking like McCain's worst night. It's almost painful, to watch this.
9:09PM - Did McCain just say "fifty percent of small business income is paid by small business?"
9:07PM - As in both previous debates, Obama starts out a little uneven -- dare I say, a little nervous? -- but McCain bails him out of it by looking positively WEIRD, sitting next to him. I've never seen him look this creepy, and that's saying something.
9:05PM - McCain repeats his pledge to take all the junk off of private bank balance sheets and transfer it to the government. The conservatives don't like this idea (not just Secretary Paulson), and if McCain is reaching for his "Mavericky" image of days gone by, this is a terrible issue to do it with, precisely because he'll actually shed voters from his right flank.
9:03PM - McCain looks bizarre tonight, what's with those wide-open eyes? I don't remember that from the first two debates (though, to be fair, I do remember the rambling).
9:01PM - ROUND ZERO GOES TO...
Once again, McCain looks very reluctant to be there -- which would make this three out of three. Click Here to Read More...
Final Pre-Debate Thoughts
Is McCain about to walk into a trap? With the Dow off by over 700 points today, me'thinks that the Bill Ayers stuff isn't going to be good enough -- and that's even before we (just) learned that the McCains accepted a free cell-phone tower on their property, to improve their reception. It's a story that hasn't blown sky-high yet, but surely could. Definitely one to watch. Ted Stevens happens to be on trial right now, not just in electoral trouble but literally on trial, for having accepted the construction of a free house from people who wanted influence on his committee, and, don't look now, but Mr. McCain's committee oversees the FCC.
For his part Mr. Obama can be expected to remain cool and nerdy and, while ready to respond on points, will almost certainly not take the bait of an emotional mud-fest. If McCain tries to have one with him, McCain will look erratic and cranky once again.
While I'm at it, I'm a little confused by the weight of public opinion in the direction of arguing that McCain needs to come out with some massive game-changing performance. Personally I think McCain needs just the opposite--a smooth and Presidential talk, that is both gracious and ingratiating, and just specific enough to make him (for once) sound like the guy who really is the steady hand at the tiller.
Whatever happens, I seem to want to think that Obama will err on the side of being just a little bit boring, and McCain will err on... well... the other one.
Let the games begin.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
For his part Mr. Obama can be expected to remain cool and nerdy and, while ready to respond on points, will almost certainly not take the bait of an emotional mud-fest. If McCain tries to have one with him, McCain will look erratic and cranky once again.
While I'm at it, I'm a little confused by the weight of public opinion in the direction of arguing that McCain needs to come out with some massive game-changing performance. Personally I think McCain needs just the opposite--a smooth and Presidential talk, that is both gracious and ingratiating, and just specific enough to make him (for once) sound like the guy who really is the steady hand at the tiller.
Whatever happens, I seem to want to think that Obama will err on the side of being just a little bit boring, and McCain will err on... well... the other one.
Let the games begin.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Anofher Day, Another Hemorrhage
-----------
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I will be live-blogging the final Presidential debate beginning at 9pm EDT on Wednesday.
-----------
It may have taken an extra twenty-four hours for the McCain campaign to determine its newest position on the economy, but on Tuesday morning the candidate did, finally, deliver his "major" policy address on the subject--an address containing many of the same proposals he's made a number of times in the past: Tax cuts to somehow stimulate the economy without an extra nickel for infrastructure, an aversion to big government from the guy who wants to spend $300Billion relieving banks of their idiotic mortgages, blah blah blah. ...And with the kind of Tuesday McCain had otherwise, the only question now is whether anyone noticed.
To begin with we had the bizarre spectacle of the chief strategist for George W. Bush's reelection campaign in 2004, Matthew Dowd, publicly eviscerating John McCain for his decision to put Sarah Palin on the ticket. "[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot," Dowd told a packed audience for the Tuesday sessions of the illustrious Time Warner summit. "He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that."
Across the spectrum of right-wing crazies to the truly crazy, it happens that on the very same day a certain Alan Keyes--you remember, the fanatical American Taliban who ran against and was profoundly humiliated by Barack Obama in his race for the Illinois Senate seat that Obama now holds--was upbraiding the McCain/Palin ticket for (get this!) saddling Palin and her pure moral compass with the job of counter-balancing the unnervingly relativistic impulses of her boss. "The American republics are (sic) based upon Constitutional principles inconsistent with a divided executive," Keyes wrote near the beginning of a twelve-paragraph missive against John McCain, much to the gleeful satisfaction of an adoring audience, consisting of a grand total of... well... gosh-- nobody, really.
Panning up and over, specifically to Alaska's largest city, Tuesday saw the Anchorage Daily News assailing Governor Palin in its editorial page--not just for the final, official documentation of her abuse of power, but for the temerity she has shown in claiming that the report in question actually exonerates her. "Sarah Palin's reaction to the Legislature's Troopergate report is an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation," so sayeth the editors. "She claims the report 'vindicates' her. She said that the investigation 'found no unlawful or unethical activity on [her] part.' Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian." Gosh, fellas, why don't you tell us how you really feel about your state's Favorite Daughter? Oh, wait a minute, they did:
Surely there must have been something else for McCain to think about, on this day that was supposed to lift the curtain on his long-awaited "campaign re-boot," no? Maybe something that doesn't have to do with Sarah Palin being reckless and stupid and a choice born of politically cynical gimmickry and a blind-eye to her dark side? Indeed there was--though by the time he was done hearing about it all, the Palin stuff must have seemed like the least of his troubles.
First there was the leak of the CBS/NYT tracking poll, showing Mr. Obama in command of an almost comically enormous fourteen-point lead, 53-39%. The main body of the poll wasn't actually due out until much later in the day, but by the time of McCain's speech the first few cross-tabs had already shown that almost nine out of ten respondents thinks the country is on the wrong track--a record-high for a statistic that has proven eerily prescient in determining the electoral (mis)fortunes of an incumbent party.
In Georgia, where early voting continues for almost another three weeks, there have already been 500,000 early votes cast--more than were cast in the entire early voting window in 2004--and African-American representation in this number is a massive eight points ahead of that for the last general election, 37-29. If McCain isn't sweating this result, he probably should be: the columnists on Fivethirtyeight.com are not at all convinced that McCain will win Georgia without contesting it, and if he loses there it will have everything to do with this unprecedented groundswell of early-vote support for Barack Obama. At the moment the McCain ticket's response to all of this Obama momentum would seem to consist of lying about the turnout at its own rallies. Something tells the Key Grip that this isn't going to be enough.
Obama's lead is so enormous and so ubiquitous that the typical amusement of watching polls in specific states has, for want of drama, given way to watching polls in four specific counties, all of them blood-red in the past two elections and all of them now trending decisively for Team Good-Guys. (And by the way, of the four, the Washoe County, Nevada result is the one that has to terrify the McCain people the most, since they absolutely cannot compete in Nevada without a clobbering victory in Reno/Sparks, and right now they aren't even winning it at all.) Perhaps there would be some positive spin to McCain's "new" economic message, and perhaps this spin would drown-out some of these disastrous polling numbers?
Perhaps not.
The transition team that Mr. McCain has assembled, against the day that pigs learn how to fly, turns out to be headed by a man whose previous posting was to lobby on behalf of the Saddam Hussein regime, in pursuit of a lifting of sanctions. The story hasn't had much traction in the mainstream press--yet--but if Mr. McCain makes good on his threat to link Obama to Bill Ayers in Wednesday evening's debate, a threat he publicly repeated on Tuesday, then one can be positively certain that the subject of his own palling around with the pall'ers-around of terrorists will surely get a mention. Perhaps in lieu of, or maybe even in addition to, the easier counter-punch in which Obama could elucidate the myriad fundraising connections between Mr. Ayers... and assorted Republicans.
Wednesday, of course, will be a totally different type of news day, no matter what. To begin with it will be completely dominated by the third Presidential debate--and is accordingly not expected to generate any meaningful content elsewhere on the political landscape. (This much may indeed be good news for McCain, as almost all of the meaningful content elsewhere on the political landscape seems to be injurious to his chances of becoming President these days.) But at the same time, McCain himself has set the bar for his performance even higher than his eye-popping deficits in the polls would have set for him independently. As has been noted elsewhere in these columns, he must attack Obama without coming across as rude and divisive in a time of crisis; he must wrest the initiative from Obama without seeming erratic and short-tempered. And he has to compete with the baseball playoffs.
My personal prediction is that Mr. Obama will foul-off every beanball thrown at him on the Hofstra stage, and that an insomnia-curing event will thence be deemed by the major pundits to have ended in a draw. My guess is that far fewer people will watch this time. My intuitions are that most voters have already made up their minds who they want to be our next President.
My confidence is that they've decided it should be Barack Obama.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I will be live-blogging the final Presidential debate beginning at 9pm EDT on Wednesday.
-----------
It may have taken an extra twenty-four hours for the McCain campaign to determine its newest position on the economy, but on Tuesday morning the candidate did, finally, deliver his "major" policy address on the subject--an address containing many of the same proposals he's made a number of times in the past: Tax cuts to somehow stimulate the economy without an extra nickel for infrastructure, an aversion to big government from the guy who wants to spend $300Billion relieving banks of their idiotic mortgages, blah blah blah. ...And with the kind of Tuesday McCain had otherwise, the only question now is whether anyone noticed.
To begin with we had the bizarre spectacle of the chief strategist for George W. Bush's reelection campaign in 2004, Matthew Dowd, publicly eviscerating John McCain for his decision to put Sarah Palin on the ticket. "[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot," Dowd told a packed audience for the Tuesday sessions of the illustrious Time Warner summit. "He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that."
Across the spectrum of right-wing crazies to the truly crazy, it happens that on the very same day a certain Alan Keyes--you remember, the fanatical American Taliban who ran against and was profoundly humiliated by Barack Obama in his race for the Illinois Senate seat that Obama now holds--was upbraiding the McCain/Palin ticket for (get this!) saddling Palin and her pure moral compass with the job of counter-balancing the unnervingly relativistic impulses of her boss. "The American republics are (sic) based upon Constitutional principles inconsistent with a divided executive," Keyes wrote near the beginning of a twelve-paragraph missive against John McCain, much to the gleeful satisfaction of an adoring audience, consisting of a grand total of... well... gosh-- nobody, really.
Panning up and over, specifically to Alaska's largest city, Tuesday saw the Anchorage Daily News assailing Governor Palin in its editorial page--not just for the final, official documentation of her abuse of power, but for the temerity she has shown in claiming that the report in question actually exonerates her. "Sarah Palin's reaction to the Legislature's Troopergate report is an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation," so sayeth the editors. "She claims the report 'vindicates' her. She said that the investigation 'found no unlawful or unethical activity on [her] part.' Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian." Gosh, fellas, why don't you tell us how you really feel about your state's Favorite Daughter? Oh, wait a minute, they did:
Perhaps Gov. Palin has been too busy to actually read the Troopergate report. Perhaps she is relying on briefings from McCain campaign spinmeisters.... Because if she had actually read it, she couldn't claim "vindication" with a straight face.... Palin's response is the kind of political "big lie" that George Orwell warned against. War is peace. Black is white. Up is down.... You asked us to hold you accountable, Gov. Palin. Did you mean it?If she did, she certainly didn't mean to include Katie Couric in her request. So, okay, how about Rush Limbaugh? After giving a typically vitriolic and hate-dappled incitement to mob violence, this time in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Palin took an hour of down-time as her excuse to make a cell-phone call to the Rush Limbaugh radio show, whereupon Mr. Limbaugh (improbably) asked if the Alaska Governor had "given much thought to her political future beyond this campaign," to which Ms. Palin responded, even more improbably, "that's a good question." And if the mainstream media takes more than its share of knocks in these columns for their militant laziness this election cycle, they needed no assistance in connecting the fatalistic dots embedded in that juicy little exchange: it was all over the major network websites within an hour of it's having happened.
Surely there must have been something else for McCain to think about, on this day that was supposed to lift the curtain on his long-awaited "campaign re-boot," no? Maybe something that doesn't have to do with Sarah Palin being reckless and stupid and a choice born of politically cynical gimmickry and a blind-eye to her dark side? Indeed there was--though by the time he was done hearing about it all, the Palin stuff must have seemed like the least of his troubles.
First there was the leak of the CBS/NYT tracking poll, showing Mr. Obama in command of an almost comically enormous fourteen-point lead, 53-39%. The main body of the poll wasn't actually due out until much later in the day, but by the time of McCain's speech the first few cross-tabs had already shown that almost nine out of ten respondents thinks the country is on the wrong track--a record-high for a statistic that has proven eerily prescient in determining the electoral (mis)fortunes of an incumbent party.
In Georgia, where early voting continues for almost another three weeks, there have already been 500,000 early votes cast--more than were cast in the entire early voting window in 2004--and African-American representation in this number is a massive eight points ahead of that for the last general election, 37-29. If McCain isn't sweating this result, he probably should be: the columnists on Fivethirtyeight.com are not at all convinced that McCain will win Georgia without contesting it, and if he loses there it will have everything to do with this unprecedented groundswell of early-vote support for Barack Obama. At the moment the McCain ticket's response to all of this Obama momentum would seem to consist of lying about the turnout at its own rallies. Something tells the Key Grip that this isn't going to be enough.
Obama's lead is so enormous and so ubiquitous that the typical amusement of watching polls in specific states has, for want of drama, given way to watching polls in four specific counties, all of them blood-red in the past two elections and all of them now trending decisively for Team Good-Guys. (And by the way, of the four, the Washoe County, Nevada result is the one that has to terrify the McCain people the most, since they absolutely cannot compete in Nevada without a clobbering victory in Reno/Sparks, and right now they aren't even winning it at all.) Perhaps there would be some positive spin to McCain's "new" economic message, and perhaps this spin would drown-out some of these disastrous polling numbers?
Perhaps not.
The transition team that Mr. McCain has assembled, against the day that pigs learn how to fly, turns out to be headed by a man whose previous posting was to lobby on behalf of the Saddam Hussein regime, in pursuit of a lifting of sanctions. The story hasn't had much traction in the mainstream press--yet--but if Mr. McCain makes good on his threat to link Obama to Bill Ayers in Wednesday evening's debate, a threat he publicly repeated on Tuesday, then one can be positively certain that the subject of his own palling around with the pall'ers-around of terrorists will surely get a mention. Perhaps in lieu of, or maybe even in addition to, the easier counter-punch in which Obama could elucidate the myriad fundraising connections between Mr. Ayers... and assorted Republicans.
Wednesday, of course, will be a totally different type of news day, no matter what. To begin with it will be completely dominated by the third Presidential debate--and is accordingly not expected to generate any meaningful content elsewhere on the political landscape. (This much may indeed be good news for McCain, as almost all of the meaningful content elsewhere on the political landscape seems to be injurious to his chances of becoming President these days.) But at the same time, McCain himself has set the bar for his performance even higher than his eye-popping deficits in the polls would have set for him independently. As has been noted elsewhere in these columns, he must attack Obama without coming across as rude and divisive in a time of crisis; he must wrest the initiative from Obama without seeming erratic and short-tempered. And he has to compete with the baseball playoffs.
My personal prediction is that Mr. Obama will foul-off every beanball thrown at him on the Hofstra stage, and that an insomnia-curing event will thence be deemed by the major pundits to have ended in a draw. My guess is that far fewer people will watch this time. My intuitions are that most voters have already made up their minds who they want to be our next President.
My confidence is that they've decided it should be Barack Obama.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
So What, Exactly, HAPPENED Yesterday?
Every once in a while I have the pleasure of reporting on a story that may not just be thinly-disguised common knowledge, and the events of Monday, October 13th offer just such an occasion. They were pleasing to behold, indeed.
It all started early Saturday morning, when the McCain/Palin campaign announced that the man at the top of their ticket would be delivering a "major policy address, laying out the details of a new economic plan" during a previously scheduled stop in southeastern Virginia, yesterday. The announcement struck few armchair analysts like myself as a surprise--seeing as how Republican opinion leaders had been publicly fretting for weeks that Team Crankypants was fumbling away its slim remaining chances by focusing on the Bill Ayers nonsense (which, in case you missed it, was finally and conclusively debunked by a nonpartisan fact-checking organization over the weekend, anyway). At all events, while Barack Obama has been stoically and methodically consolidating his claim as the bearer of sounder judgment and steadier hand, Team Red has seen fit to live up to Obama's principal charge against them, by behaving more and more erratically, with a less and less defined message.
The task of getting McCain/Palin back on track was ostensibly to begin with major Republican columnists around the country priming the mainstream media for a "reboot" narrative, in which McCain/Palin would essentially start campaigning anew. There would be a focused message oriented around their plans for the imploding economy, these columnists were hinting, and that new message was hinted to contain many new initiatives to which Mr. Obama, for once, would have to respond. Then, at McCain's Monday stop in Virginia, he would lift the curtain on this new message, and the entire dynamic of the final three weeks of the campaign would be carried out at Mr. McCain's initiative instead of Mr. Obama's.
Certainly if Republican Presidential fortunes were to turn in this election, the moment was now: Recent news stories had shown that Mr. Obama is leading conclusively among Latinos--a bloc without which McCain could expect to lose badly in the crucial battlegrounds of the inter-mountain west, and a separate report published on Monday showed that Obama is also enjoying a lead (albeit a fragile one) in, of all places, North Dakota. The current electoral-vote map as assembled from the projections on fivethirtyeight.com, not counting leaner states, shows Mr. Obama leading 338-151, with recent pickups of both Ohio and Florida.
Mr. McCain, by contrast, may no longer count on North Dakota, Montana, or the second congressional district of Nebraska--any one of which would have seemed preposterous losses to ponder, as recently as 2004. By any standard with which one cares to view the situation, McCain/Palin is in the final throes of a meltdown that makes the one on Wall Street look vague and indecisive by comparison.
When asked what he'd planned to do to help Mr. McCain hold Florida, Governor Charlie Crist issued a terse reply, saying, "When I have time to help, I'll try to do that." Asked what this means, Governor Crist apparently attempted to spin the "bsuiness of being Governor" into a plausible excuse for having skipped a McCain/Palin rally over the weekend--despite the fact that the freed-up time in question was spent at Disneyworld. Obviously, when the Republican Governor of Florida is running away and hiding from the Republican candidate for President, it's past time for the Presidential candidate to execute the much-vaunted and much-hyped reboot we'd been told to expect on Monday.
There was even a carefully orchestrated press-leak of the full text of Mr. McCain's planned speech--which, to this author's untrained eye, at least, doesn't look like much more than a slightly more concentrated tincture of the messages McCain had been delivering up to that point: The government is already too big, Mr. Obama wants to make it bigger, we can't have a recovery if we're paying higher taxes, blah-blah-blah. It's a message that I wouldn't have expected to work, given the obviously increased role for government that our economy presently demands--but, then again, I wouldn't have expected the Palin speech at the GOP convention to have worked as well as it did, either.
On this score there may well have been cause to worry: even people whose 401k's have lost 30% of their value in ten days, can respond pretty doggone viscerally to the message that the other guy is gonna raise their taxes. It probably wouldn't have worked, but it may well have tightened the race considerably, if for no other reason than for the excuse it would give a lazy mainstream press (to whip the event into some non-existent sea change in the conversation).
Except for one small problem: The speech never got delivered. At about ten o'clock Sunday morning, breathlessly and without explanation, the McCain/Palin ticket informed the press that no such major policy changes would be announced by their candidate at the Virginia speech. When pressed, senior campaign officials (unbelievably) tried to blame their surrogates--for mistakenly reporting existing planks in McCain's economic plan as though they were new. This was most evident with respect to Senator Lindsay Graham's comments on the Sunday-morning news talks, that McCain would reveal in his Monday speech a plan to press for even deeper cuts in the tax rates on capital gains. "We don't know why he said that," replied Mr. McCain’s senior policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, when asked about the disconnect. Then, when the reporter interviewing him tried for a follow-up, Holtz-Eakin interrupted him, saying, “I have no comment on anything [pertaining to economic proposals], to anybody.”
Now, come on. The campaign releases the text of a "major policy speech delivering new policy initiatives on the economy," and then, when the candidate doesn't give the speech, it's the fault of Lindsay Graham? Seriously, what on earth is going on, here?
Fortunately we have the dogged and unsung foot-soldiers of Politico.com, at one end of the pundit pipeline, and Republican opinion leaders like Ed Rollins and fellow Reagan policy advisor Bruce Bartlett, at the other, to shed the necessary and delicious light on the subject. What happens turns out to have been very simple: The highest officers in the McCain/Palin campaign are at this very moment engaged in open warfare--with each other.
The first signs that this was the explanation for the policy-speech-that-wasn't came from the story about the matter that appeared yesterday on Politico.com, where a tense series of weekend meetings was first broken. When asked for further details on what, exactly, had happened in these meetings, the participants refused all comment. When asked to confirm or deny that the meetings had collapsed in rancorous disagreement over what policy solutions McCain should offer, the participants declined to do either one.
And then there was a quote and a column, in rapid succession, from two of Reagan's genius tacticians, suggesting that the in-fighting was real, and that it was sinking McCain's chances. “At this point I don’t think McCain can say anything on the economy that will sound credible,” said Bruce Bartlett, Reagan's one-time Senior Economic Adviser, after which Ed Rollins published a commentary on CNN.com, in which he compared the lack of cohesion in the McCain campaign to that of Hillary Clinton's doomed candidacy earlier this year. "A campaign at war with itself cannot fight its opponent effectively," wrote Mr. Rollins--in what may be an early frontrunner for understatement-of-the-century.
From here the paths to salvation become exceedingly narrow and implausible for McCain. Already the mainstream press has begun experimenting with spinning the campaign's itinerary as a sign of desperation on their part--something the rest of us noticed weeks ago, but which will nonetheless present yet another "filter" through which any new initiatives proposed by McCain must successfully pass, to make a difference. More or less at the same moment, it has separately emerged that there may not be any such thing as the so-called "Bradley Effect," by which an African-American candidate receives an inflated level of hypothetical support in pre-electoral polls, on the basis that people don't want to show their racism to pollsters. (The news story in question suggests that the Bradley in question--a black candidate for Governor of California--was polling ahead of his eventual performance because of poor methodology on the part of the pollsters, and not because people were hiding their preferences.) On top of all of this, the RNC has just announced that it will divert five million dollars of its paltry resources from the Presidential campaign into a series of close Senate contests--though even here the Republican prospects are dim and getting dimmer.
There is of course the third debate--an event at which Mr. McCain has promised to "whoop Obama's you-know-what"--though at this late stage in the election it may well be the lowest-rated and least persuasive of the four, even if McCain makes good on his promise. Which, frankly, seems pretty darned unlikely, to this author. Political analysts don't like to say anything conclusive, if only not to risk looking foolish, but it has seemed increasingly safe for some time now to suppose that, barring a major, out-of-their-hands change of fortunes, the outcome of this election is no longer in doubt.
The question will soon shift away from this altogether, even in the eyes of the mainstream media, and on to the even more complex issue of what, exactly, the next President can do with such a compromised set of options for moving forward. Fortunately for us, it is Mr. Obama who has demonstrated that he is up to such a challenge, and Mr. Obama who is now essentially assured of getting it.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
It all started early Saturday morning, when the McCain/Palin campaign announced that the man at the top of their ticket would be delivering a "major policy address, laying out the details of a new economic plan" during a previously scheduled stop in southeastern Virginia, yesterday. The announcement struck few armchair analysts like myself as a surprise--seeing as how Republican opinion leaders had been publicly fretting for weeks that Team Crankypants was fumbling away its slim remaining chances by focusing on the Bill Ayers nonsense (which, in case you missed it, was finally and conclusively debunked by a nonpartisan fact-checking organization over the weekend, anyway). At all events, while Barack Obama has been stoically and methodically consolidating his claim as the bearer of sounder judgment and steadier hand, Team Red has seen fit to live up to Obama's principal charge against them, by behaving more and more erratically, with a less and less defined message.
The task of getting McCain/Palin back on track was ostensibly to begin with major Republican columnists around the country priming the mainstream media for a "reboot" narrative, in which McCain/Palin would essentially start campaigning anew. There would be a focused message oriented around their plans for the imploding economy, these columnists were hinting, and that new message was hinted to contain many new initiatives to which Mr. Obama, for once, would have to respond. Then, at McCain's Monday stop in Virginia, he would lift the curtain on this new message, and the entire dynamic of the final three weeks of the campaign would be carried out at Mr. McCain's initiative instead of Mr. Obama's.
Certainly if Republican Presidential fortunes were to turn in this election, the moment was now: Recent news stories had shown that Mr. Obama is leading conclusively among Latinos--a bloc without which McCain could expect to lose badly in the crucial battlegrounds of the inter-mountain west, and a separate report published on Monday showed that Obama is also enjoying a lead (albeit a fragile one) in, of all places, North Dakota. The current electoral-vote map as assembled from the projections on fivethirtyeight.com, not counting leaner states, shows Mr. Obama leading 338-151, with recent pickups of both Ohio and Florida.
Mr. McCain, by contrast, may no longer count on North Dakota, Montana, or the second congressional district of Nebraska--any one of which would have seemed preposterous losses to ponder, as recently as 2004. By any standard with which one cares to view the situation, McCain/Palin is in the final throes of a meltdown that makes the one on Wall Street look vague and indecisive by comparison.
When asked what he'd planned to do to help Mr. McCain hold Florida, Governor Charlie Crist issued a terse reply, saying, "When I have time to help, I'll try to do that." Asked what this means, Governor Crist apparently attempted to spin the "bsuiness of being Governor" into a plausible excuse for having skipped a McCain/Palin rally over the weekend--despite the fact that the freed-up time in question was spent at Disneyworld. Obviously, when the Republican Governor of Florida is running away and hiding from the Republican candidate for President, it's past time for the Presidential candidate to execute the much-vaunted and much-hyped reboot we'd been told to expect on Monday.
There was even a carefully orchestrated press-leak of the full text of Mr. McCain's planned speech--which, to this author's untrained eye, at least, doesn't look like much more than a slightly more concentrated tincture of the messages McCain had been delivering up to that point: The government is already too big, Mr. Obama wants to make it bigger, we can't have a recovery if we're paying higher taxes, blah-blah-blah. It's a message that I wouldn't have expected to work, given the obviously increased role for government that our economy presently demands--but, then again, I wouldn't have expected the Palin speech at the GOP convention to have worked as well as it did, either.
On this score there may well have been cause to worry: even people whose 401k's have lost 30% of their value in ten days, can respond pretty doggone viscerally to the message that the other guy is gonna raise their taxes. It probably wouldn't have worked, but it may well have tightened the race considerably, if for no other reason than for the excuse it would give a lazy mainstream press (to whip the event into some non-existent sea change in the conversation).
Except for one small problem: The speech never got delivered. At about ten o'clock Sunday morning, breathlessly and without explanation, the McCain/Palin ticket informed the press that no such major policy changes would be announced by their candidate at the Virginia speech. When pressed, senior campaign officials (unbelievably) tried to blame their surrogates--for mistakenly reporting existing planks in McCain's economic plan as though they were new. This was most evident with respect to Senator Lindsay Graham's comments on the Sunday-morning news talks, that McCain would reveal in his Monday speech a plan to press for even deeper cuts in the tax rates on capital gains. "We don't know why he said that," replied Mr. McCain’s senior policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, when asked about the disconnect. Then, when the reporter interviewing him tried for a follow-up, Holtz-Eakin interrupted him, saying, “I have no comment on anything [pertaining to economic proposals], to anybody.”
Now, come on. The campaign releases the text of a "major policy speech delivering new policy initiatives on the economy," and then, when the candidate doesn't give the speech, it's the fault of Lindsay Graham? Seriously, what on earth is going on, here?
Fortunately we have the dogged and unsung foot-soldiers of Politico.com, at one end of the pundit pipeline, and Republican opinion leaders like Ed Rollins and fellow Reagan policy advisor Bruce Bartlett, at the other, to shed the necessary and delicious light on the subject. What happens turns out to have been very simple: The highest officers in the McCain/Palin campaign are at this very moment engaged in open warfare--with each other.
The first signs that this was the explanation for the policy-speech-that-wasn't came from the story about the matter that appeared yesterday on Politico.com, where a tense series of weekend meetings was first broken. When asked for further details on what, exactly, had happened in these meetings, the participants refused all comment. When asked to confirm or deny that the meetings had collapsed in rancorous disagreement over what policy solutions McCain should offer, the participants declined to do either one.
And then there was a quote and a column, in rapid succession, from two of Reagan's genius tacticians, suggesting that the in-fighting was real, and that it was sinking McCain's chances. “At this point I don’t think McCain can say anything on the economy that will sound credible,” said Bruce Bartlett, Reagan's one-time Senior Economic Adviser, after which Ed Rollins published a commentary on CNN.com, in which he compared the lack of cohesion in the McCain campaign to that of Hillary Clinton's doomed candidacy earlier this year. "A campaign at war with itself cannot fight its opponent effectively," wrote Mr. Rollins--in what may be an early frontrunner for understatement-of-the-century.
From here the paths to salvation become exceedingly narrow and implausible for McCain. Already the mainstream press has begun experimenting with spinning the campaign's itinerary as a sign of desperation on their part--something the rest of us noticed weeks ago, but which will nonetheless present yet another "filter" through which any new initiatives proposed by McCain must successfully pass, to make a difference. More or less at the same moment, it has separately emerged that there may not be any such thing as the so-called "Bradley Effect," by which an African-American candidate receives an inflated level of hypothetical support in pre-electoral polls, on the basis that people don't want to show their racism to pollsters. (The news story in question suggests that the Bradley in question--a black candidate for Governor of California--was polling ahead of his eventual performance because of poor methodology on the part of the pollsters, and not because people were hiding their preferences.) On top of all of this, the RNC has just announced that it will divert five million dollars of its paltry resources from the Presidential campaign into a series of close Senate contests--though even here the Republican prospects are dim and getting dimmer.
There is of course the third debate--an event at which Mr. McCain has promised to "whoop Obama's you-know-what"--though at this late stage in the election it may well be the lowest-rated and least persuasive of the four, even if McCain makes good on his promise. Which, frankly, seems pretty darned unlikely, to this author. Political analysts don't like to say anything conclusive, if only not to risk looking foolish, but it has seemed increasingly safe for some time now to suppose that, barring a major, out-of-their-hands change of fortunes, the outcome of this election is no longer in doubt.
The question will soon shift away from this altogether, even in the eyes of the mainstream media, and on to the even more complex issue of what, exactly, the next President can do with such a compromised set of options for moving forward. Fortunately for us, it is Mr. Obama who has demonstrated that he is up to such a challenge, and Mr. Obama who is now essentially assured of getting it.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
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