First thing's first. You gotta love Tina Fey. Once again last night on SNL the comely and uber-intelligent comedienne nailed her parody of Sarah Palin, this time with respect to her performance in Thursday's Vice Presidential debate. "What, you mean we're not gonna do the talent portion?" she asks, near the end of a pitch-perfect send-up that lasted over ten minutes and featured, as an added bonus, the eerily resemblant Queen Latifah in the role of Gwyn Ifil. (Thanks to a loyal reader for calling The Key Grip's attention to the link.) The Governor's performance--initially applauded by this author for its lack of stupendous gaffes--has been widely criticized for its machine-made texture and in-bred evasiveness, including a quick jab by NBC's Brian Williams on Friday Night's installment of The Late Show With David Letterman.
Indeed it wasn't a terrific day for the McCain/Palin ticket all 'round--though anymore that isn't saying all that much, now is it. Specifically, a Republican party activist in Alaska made public her recently-filed lawsuit against Governor Palin, demanding full disclosure of e-mails sent as official business from Palin's assorted private accounts. (Proving once again that being a "barracuda" doesn't always play so well when the people being bitten are from inside one's own organization.) Elsewhere in the same state, a judge agreed to let several of the Troopergate subpoenas proceed, including that of the Governor's husband, Todd Palin, virtually guaranteeing that Mr. Palin will have to testify in this festering scandal which still carries the potential for massive embarrassment and possibly even criminal charges against the Vice Presidential nominee herself.
At the precise moment when Palin's boss is most sorely needed to rescue the fortunes of his own candidacy, Mr. McCain announced yesterday that he will instead be disappearing from public view altogether until Tuesday night's second Presidential debate. The one thin ray of good news for the Republicans here is that a credulous and more-lazy-than-biased mainstream press has completely missed this story, relaying its factual content as if this were the most reasonable thing imaginable, instead of wondering aloud if there might be insidious--perhaps even terrifying--reasons why the candidate would want or need to be out of the public eye for four of the most important days of his political life.
With early voting already underway in Virginia and Ohio--both of which are crucial to McCain's electoral fortunes, and in both of which Mr. Obama is comfortably ahead--tempers on the part of the Republican bully foot-soldiers are beginning to sour. Specifically, a would-be vote intimidator in Ohio has filed a lawsuit with the state to try to force his way into an "observer's" role in Franklin County (which contains Columbus), despite the fact that the state has no such provision in its constitution. The case will be heard by the Supreme Court, but without either a legal precedent or a statute in state law on which to fall back, the outcome seems hardly in doubt and the episode is bound to play in the Buckeye State as the naked play for disenfranchisement that it surely is.
Meanwhile, in his ongoing and highly successful effort to expand the electoral map, Barack Obama has managed to put the second congressional district of Nebraska--and area skirting the cities of Omaha and Lincoln--squarely in play. Over and above what it says about McCain's general prospects, this ugly little tidbit specifically demands that the already resource-strapped and defensively postured McCain team expend precious time and energy to hold the district, primarily out of fears that this single electoral vote will make the difference between a 269-269 tie and a clean win for Team Blue, which it certainly could. As a sign of how seriously they take the threat, the campaign has dispatched Sarah Palin herself to Omaha. Anything could still happen, of course, but when the Republican ticket for President is trotting its top draw onto a stage in Omaha with a month to go, we may take it as read that things are going very badly for them indeed.
Very few people in this great land of ours are so naive or under-informed so as not to know what's coming next from Team Crankypants--the final, Hail-Mary attempts to portray Barack Obama as a scary boogeyman. Yesterday, as the ground-level side of these efforts began in earnest with Sarah Palin's pitiful attempt to link Obama to William Ayers, Steve Schmidt announced that the ticket would pull virtually all of its remaining positively themed television ads, replacing them with negative spots intended to portray Obama "and his liberal allies" as big-government spenders, who took no stand on the bailout, and who bear the primary responsibility for jobs being lost to overseas markets. Elsewhere on the airwaves a battery of newly-formed 527's is expected to make its presence known with more personality-driven attacks on Obama and his supposedly shadowy, supposed connections to Ayers, Rezko, and Rev. Wright.
The Obama campaign, ever mindful of its larger, cooler-headed strategy, has saved its most adroit response to the changing circumstances for its most beneficial moment: In rapid succession they released new, policy-specific contrast ads of their own--portraying McCain as the candidate under whom one's tax liability would actually increase--and, even more deftly, announced that they would beat Mr. McCain's newest attack ads onto the air with a commercial suggesting that such attacks are an attempt by McCain to change the subject. In a rare moment of confluence between a national Democratic campaign strategy, and the untrained armchair intuitions of this author, the Obama people are about to make the nature of McCain's campaign into a campaign issue unto itself, labeling McCain's behavior from last week as "erratic" and suggesting--quite forcefully--that the forthcoming negative ads against their candidate are an attempt by McCain "to turn the page," something the middle-class in middle America can't do quite so easily. It's an amazingly effective ad, precisely because it's all true.
Most pundits will tell you that personality-driven attack ads are highly effective. The public doesn't like them, we are asked to believe, but they move voters anyway. This is true when viewed through a macro lens like this, but it becomes less true when the specifics of the race are taken into account: Negative ads work very well when a significant portion of the electorate hasn't yet made up its mind in a permanent way (e.g., Dukakis), when the reason to vote for the person being attacked is structurally insufficient (e.g., Kerry), or when the ads resonate with people who'd already come independently to the same, specific negative opinions in advance (e.g., Gore).
They don't work nearly as well when the principal knock against the candidate has already been dispelled by his own public persona (e.g., Reagan), and certainly not when the the person being attacked is prepared to turn the nature of the attack itself into a talking-point (e.g., Clinton). In these cases, particularly after a series of attempts to shake-up the dynamic of the election on the part of the attacker have already publicly and spectacularly failed, the attacks themselves are far more likely to be dismissed by the persuadable middle as shrill and desperate. Jimmy Carter, lest we forget, didn't stop running negative ads just because Reagan dispelled their content in the debate; they just stopped working.
It would seem that Barack Obama is indeed now in a position to drive the final nail, and isn't hesitating to do exactly that. With effective ads articulating the hidden tax burden of McCain's supposed credits, he keeps the discussion squarely focused on domestic policy--where his thumb is so firmly on the scale already that he gained eight points in tracking polls during meltdown week before he'd even uttered a single word. By nullifying McCain's personality-play in advance, with an even more effective ad that switches us back to domestic policy once again, Obama preempts the last, desperate move of a desperate campaign, framing them as vulnerable and rudderless in the final precious hours leading into the first Presidential debate that anyone will actually get to see, since it won't be broadcast at nine o'clock on a Friday night.
Predictions about what might happen next are always dangerous, but with this decided reversal of air-war fortunes it would seem less dangerous than it might otherwise, to predict a big night on Tuesday for Barack Obama, and a further separation in the popularity of the two tickets as a result. It seems likely that McCain will deal with the nullification of his ugly tactics at an emotional level, perhaps behaving even more erratically than he had during the time-frame depicted in Obama's new commercial. Certainly the drinking-game word for the night could, if this author endorsed such things, be "erratic"--and even more certainly, the McCain/Palin ticket will signal its accession of defeat if that word leaks from their own guy's mouth even a single time.
I believe that we are witnessing, in real time, the end-game of this election, with Obama pulling just the right levers, in just the right order, to close the deal on becoming our nation's first African-American Chief Executive. There's a month left, of course--but it took McCain six weeks of summer to whittle a lead that was half the size with his Paris Hilton / Celebrity play, and a goodly chunk of that time Mr. Obama was either overseas or on vacation. Even October surprises that are external to campaign strategy may not be enough to save McCain, now.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Maybe Proud is Too Strong a Word?
Not twelve hours after Governor Palin's unexpectedly passable performance in Thursday night's debate, those of us who'd gone out of our way to be gracious, even wax just a little prideful at a self-evidently overmatched opponent's capacity to buck-up under extraordinary pressure, were rewarded with a reprise of the kinds of behavior that had us calling her names in the first place. In short order yesterday, she blasted Barack Obama for a fact-checked statement about our ineffectual efforts in Afghanistan, she orchestrated a move by a handful of Republican legislators in Alaska trying once again to quash the Troopergate investigation, she released personal income tax returns showing that she'd failed to report her 2006 and 2007 per diem payments for the days she spent "working" out of her home, and, perhaps most infuriating to those progressives who'd felt a small sense of ownership in her sudden recovery, she blamed her recent and disastrous interview performances on Katie Couric:
...Which, if you're keeping score at home, folks, translates as, "I don't think I should have to answer anyone else's questions, in order to have access to the national television audience."
In the cold light of a second morning's reflection on the matter, it is indeed much more obvious than it was at the time that Governor Palin's performance in the debate itself was a ninety-minute macrocosm of this same principle: Say only that which you want to say, regardless of what you've been asked or whether it fits the moment or even whether it's coherent--and then celebrate yourself for it, as someone who bucks the "media filter" in order to speak "directly to the American people." Here, for example, is the full transcript of her answer to the question Gwyn Ifil posed about the two campaigns' competing education policies:
...To borrow a phrase from Jack Cafferty, uh, did you get that? Twice during the debate--once near the beginning and once at the very end--Governor Palin flaunted her refusal to abide by the structure to which she had formally and demonstrably agreed. "I may be a Washington outsider," she said in the early minutes when the question didn't fit one of her note-cards, "I may not answer the questions exactly the way [my opponent] or the moderator wants me to, but I'm gonna speak from the heart and straight to the American people." And then, at the end of the debate, a reprieve of this undoubtedly focus-group tested line, just in case we missed it the first time: "I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter ... of the mainstream media kinda telling viewers what they just heard. I'd rather just be able to speak to the American people."
That this argument hasn't scored an overwhelmingly positive response from the persuadable middle is a rare (or at least seemingly rare) testimony to that cohort's capacity to proscribe--or at least to diagnose--bullshit. Nobody who saw the Katie Couric interviews really thought that it was Katie Couric's fault that Sarah Palin was unable to name a single print-media source, a single example of her boss calling for increased oversight, or a single Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade. The debate-trackers showed this, their lines plunging more-or-less every time Ms. Palin opened her mouth, and the polls afterward showed it, with undecided respondents favoring Biden by 5-3 margins.
This is good news, surely--but it portends a frustrating week for progressives like this author, specifically because the Obama/Biden ticket is wise enough to approach such matters with a cool head and a decidedly under-played hand. If I can tell, from an un-dusted home office in Gainesville, Florida, that the general public didn't buy the Sarah Palin, one-person-show version of Hee-Haw, then surely Team Blue has access to a far richer battery of polling data, undoubtedly showing internals that point to letting her inflict the damage on herself, so as not to give her the cover of being attacked by supposed "sexists." To the rest of us, watching her grin smugly and pat herself on the back for banging away on this "straight to the American people" nonsense, it will appear as though she has gotten away with it. And that will be very frustrating, if it isn't already.
But one other thing happened yesterday that intimately involves Sarah Palin, and it is this last news story that, I believe, raises the most serious questions about the Alaska Governor and her personal character: It was announced yesterday afternoon that Palin had openly disagreed with the McCain campaign's decision to withdraw from Michigan. "Aw, do we have to?" was her e-mail response, when told of the news by a campaign understudy. (And entirely by the way, we seem to be left to our own speculations as to where exactly McCain's supposed partner and confidant was, when this fateful decision was actually getting made.)
If the charge that Palin isn't smart enough to do the job seems only to resonate with those of us who are smart enough to care (Bob Herbert of the New York Times on Friday called her the "human exclamation point") the charge that she is ruthlessly ambitious is one that the McCain team would be well-advised to take into far more serious consideration--both because it has greater potential to resonate with the public, and because it could be the catalytic event in the final public undoing of their candidate at the top of the ticket. Few of my friends missed Governor Palin's reference to making the Vice Presidency more powerful (after claiming, somewhat bizarrely, to be versed enough on the Constitution to know that this could be the case if only the rest of us wanted it), and if the McCain people didn't sit straight up in their chairs at that undoubtedly off-the-script remark, then they certainly should have.
In the room where I was watching, none of us could supress the groan--but I daresay the undecided voter out there in TV-land "got it," too: The combination of spikey proficiency on energy issues, together with a desire to see a far more powerful office of Vice President, will undoubtedly strike all but the lowest of l0w-information voters as a refrain just a little too familiar for comfort. The McCain people would do well to rein Ms. Palin in on this unusually touchy subject, before the comparisons from unfriendly columnists stop being about the first President Bush's running-mate, and start being about the second.
Perhaps even more to the point, they would be wise to undertake a full and uncensored vetting of the Governor's motives for bundling these two statements--the desire to enhance the power of the Vice Preisdency, on the one hand, and the apparent confidence to openly disagree with the campaign about major strategic decisions, on the other.
This is, after all, a public figure who is only public outside of Wasilla, Alaska, as a result of a long train of intra-party fights to the death, in which her folksy manner and good looks concealed a willingness to stop at nothing to get what she wanted. Palin burned bridges to get her spot on the primary ballot for Lieutenant Governor in 2002 and then, when she went down to defeat, burned even more of them to land the Oil and Gas commission. The instant it became hers, she launched herself into a full-frontal attack on the man who'd given it to her, on the basis that the position itself was a waste of public trust--ultimately running against him in a primary fight to become Governor, apparently on the basis that the previous occupant had been foolish enough to hire her. And by the way, don't laugh: it worked.
Fast-forward to early October of 2008, and the same Sarah Palin--the woman whom Team Crankypants takes such delight in calling "Sarah Barracuda"--is now openly questioning her bosses once again, and nobody inside the campaign is minding? Authors far more seasoned at these dynamics than I have already speculated that Palin has privately conceded the outcome of this contest and is now positioning herself to claim that she'd have managed the whole thing differently, when she herself runs for President in 2012. If those analysts are correct, and there is no reason to assume that they aren't from Palin's resume, then it seems a short throw from questioning McCain's decision on Michigan, to questioning McCain himself.
The ticket is, of course, already almost beyond saving anyway: Fivethirtyeight is not yet calling New Hampshire for Obama but will do so when the late-breaking polls from yesterday are integrated into their regressions--a development that will put Obama on 273 without Virginia, Ohio, Florida, or Nevada, in all of which he is leading by slightly smaller margins. The question of the hour might not be whether or not Palin herself can undo her benefactor's chances of electoral success: he may not still have any to undo. But if Governor Palin is, indeed, trying to recycle a familiar and proven formula for self-promotion at the expense of others in her own party, then the true blunder of McCain's less than thorough vetting of her will only be apparent after the fact.
And wouldn't that be the most delicious irony of all? That, after all these weeks in which progressives like The Key Grip were savagely criticizing Palin for being too stupid to be Vice President, the fatal undoing of McCain and his party could end up being that she wasn't quite stupid enough?
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
I did feel there were a lot of things she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are that are represented in our ticket. I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that’s also an indication about being outside that Washington elite, outside that media elite also, and just wanting to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for.
...Which, if you're keeping score at home, folks, translates as, "I don't think I should have to answer anyone else's questions, in order to have access to the national television audience."
In the cold light of a second morning's reflection on the matter, it is indeed much more obvious than it was at the time that Governor Palin's performance in the debate itself was a ninety-minute macrocosm of this same principle: Say only that which you want to say, regardless of what you've been asked or whether it fits the moment or even whether it's coherent--and then celebrate yourself for it, as someone who bucks the "media filter" in order to speak "directly to the American people." Here, for example, is the full transcript of her answer to the question Gwyn Ifil posed about the two campaigns' competing education policies:
Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he's a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.
...To borrow a phrase from Jack Cafferty, uh, did you get that? Twice during the debate--once near the beginning and once at the very end--Governor Palin flaunted her refusal to abide by the structure to which she had formally and demonstrably agreed. "I may be a Washington outsider," she said in the early minutes when the question didn't fit one of her note-cards, "I may not answer the questions exactly the way [my opponent] or the moderator wants me to, but I'm gonna speak from the heart and straight to the American people." And then, at the end of the debate, a reprieve of this undoubtedly focus-group tested line, just in case we missed it the first time: "I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter ... of the mainstream media kinda telling viewers what they just heard. I'd rather just be able to speak to the American people."
That this argument hasn't scored an overwhelmingly positive response from the persuadable middle is a rare (or at least seemingly rare) testimony to that cohort's capacity to proscribe--or at least to diagnose--bullshit. Nobody who saw the Katie Couric interviews really thought that it was Katie Couric's fault that Sarah Palin was unable to name a single print-media source, a single example of her boss calling for increased oversight, or a single Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade. The debate-trackers showed this, their lines plunging more-or-less every time Ms. Palin opened her mouth, and the polls afterward showed it, with undecided respondents favoring Biden by 5-3 margins.
This is good news, surely--but it portends a frustrating week for progressives like this author, specifically because the Obama/Biden ticket is wise enough to approach such matters with a cool head and a decidedly under-played hand. If I can tell, from an un-dusted home office in Gainesville, Florida, that the general public didn't buy the Sarah Palin, one-person-show version of Hee-Haw, then surely Team Blue has access to a far richer battery of polling data, undoubtedly showing internals that point to letting her inflict the damage on herself, so as not to give her the cover of being attacked by supposed "sexists." To the rest of us, watching her grin smugly and pat herself on the back for banging away on this "straight to the American people" nonsense, it will appear as though she has gotten away with it. And that will be very frustrating, if it isn't already.
But one other thing happened yesterday that intimately involves Sarah Palin, and it is this last news story that, I believe, raises the most serious questions about the Alaska Governor and her personal character: It was announced yesterday afternoon that Palin had openly disagreed with the McCain campaign's decision to withdraw from Michigan. "Aw, do we have to?" was her e-mail response, when told of the news by a campaign understudy. (And entirely by the way, we seem to be left to our own speculations as to where exactly McCain's supposed partner and confidant was, when this fateful decision was actually getting made.)
If the charge that Palin isn't smart enough to do the job seems only to resonate with those of us who are smart enough to care (Bob Herbert of the New York Times on Friday called her the "human exclamation point") the charge that she is ruthlessly ambitious is one that the McCain team would be well-advised to take into far more serious consideration--both because it has greater potential to resonate with the public, and because it could be the catalytic event in the final public undoing of their candidate at the top of the ticket. Few of my friends missed Governor Palin's reference to making the Vice Presidency more powerful (after claiming, somewhat bizarrely, to be versed enough on the Constitution to know that this could be the case if only the rest of us wanted it), and if the McCain people didn't sit straight up in their chairs at that undoubtedly off-the-script remark, then they certainly should have.
In the room where I was watching, none of us could supress the groan--but I daresay the undecided voter out there in TV-land "got it," too: The combination of spikey proficiency on energy issues, together with a desire to see a far more powerful office of Vice President, will undoubtedly strike all but the lowest of l0w-information voters as a refrain just a little too familiar for comfort. The McCain people would do well to rein Ms. Palin in on this unusually touchy subject, before the comparisons from unfriendly columnists stop being about the first President Bush's running-mate, and start being about the second.
Perhaps even more to the point, they would be wise to undertake a full and uncensored vetting of the Governor's motives for bundling these two statements--the desire to enhance the power of the Vice Preisdency, on the one hand, and the apparent confidence to openly disagree with the campaign about major strategic decisions, on the other.
This is, after all, a public figure who is only public outside of Wasilla, Alaska, as a result of a long train of intra-party fights to the death, in which her folksy manner and good looks concealed a willingness to stop at nothing to get what she wanted. Palin burned bridges to get her spot on the primary ballot for Lieutenant Governor in 2002 and then, when she went down to defeat, burned even more of them to land the Oil and Gas commission. The instant it became hers, she launched herself into a full-frontal attack on the man who'd given it to her, on the basis that the position itself was a waste of public trust--ultimately running against him in a primary fight to become Governor, apparently on the basis that the previous occupant had been foolish enough to hire her. And by the way, don't laugh: it worked.
Fast-forward to early October of 2008, and the same Sarah Palin--the woman whom Team Crankypants takes such delight in calling "Sarah Barracuda"--is now openly questioning her bosses once again, and nobody inside the campaign is minding? Authors far more seasoned at these dynamics than I have already speculated that Palin has privately conceded the outcome of this contest and is now positioning herself to claim that she'd have managed the whole thing differently, when she herself runs for President in 2012. If those analysts are correct, and there is no reason to assume that they aren't from Palin's resume, then it seems a short throw from questioning McCain's decision on Michigan, to questioning McCain himself.
The ticket is, of course, already almost beyond saving anyway: Fivethirtyeight is not yet calling New Hampshire for Obama but will do so when the late-breaking polls from yesterday are integrated into their regressions--a development that will put Obama on 273 without Virginia, Ohio, Florida, or Nevada, in all of which he is leading by slightly smaller margins. The question of the hour might not be whether or not Palin herself can undo her benefactor's chances of electoral success: he may not still have any to undo. But if Governor Palin is, indeed, trying to recycle a familiar and proven formula for self-promotion at the expense of others in her own party, then the true blunder of McCain's less than thorough vetting of her will only be apparent after the fact.
And wouldn't that be the most delicious irony of all? That, after all these weeks in which progressives like The Key Grip were savagely criticizing Palin for being too stupid to be Vice President, the fatal undoing of McCain and his party could end up being that she wasn't quite stupid enough?
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Friday, October 3, 2008
A Tale of Three Winners, But Only One Win
Instant reactions to a debate, and to a lesser extent the morning-after reactions, are often tilted
very slightly in favor of the Democrat on the stage--precisely because debates are at least in theory all about substantive policy positions. You can't look the part of the superior policy craftsman if your platform consists of manipulating the low-information voters of the country into despising their own government. An analyst who had only the instant and overnight polls to go by would've concluded that George W. Bush narrowly lost all three debates with Al Gore and then, four years later, narrowly lost all three debates with John Kerry. (Viewed through the correct end of the telescope, I would argue that he lost, at most, two of these--the third debate against Gore and the first debate against Kerry.)
An awareness of this dynamic would have done nothing to ease the pressure on Governor Sarah Palin, facing as she was the enormous challenge of neutralizing her rapidly cementing image as a woman who can't name print media titles or supreme court decisions or give an answer about foreign policy that isn't about the eastern reaches of her home state. As the undercard on a ticket playing as many as eleven points behind last night, with the news getting worse almost by the hour (McCain inexplicably picked Thursday to pull out of Michigan, so that this dreadful news story could compete with whatever performance Palin managed to turn in), the woman who'd been unable to finish the word caricature eight days earlier found herself in an all but no-win situation. In essence she'd been saddled with the job of righting a vessel that was shipping water faster than her boss could bail it out, and with the built-in disadvantage alluded to above, Palin was in a quadruple-hole: the less-important actor on a soggy ticket that nearly always loses debates on first glance, with high personal negatives. Putting her in such a position was nothing short of electoral malpractice on the part of Team Crankypants--something for which they should be hammered in Obama/Biden stump speeches for the pure callousness it self-evidently projects.
That Governor Palin did as well as she did is an accomplishment of which all of us--Republican and Democrat alike--may be proud. It doesn't take agreement with her on... well... anything, to recognize that she didn't just out-perform relative to expectations, she kept the matter relatively close (a far higher standard, given what had been happening for the few days leading up to the event). She was too folksy for my weak constitutions for such nonsense, too quick to flash us a teeth-gritted and obviously fake smile, and way, way, way too quick to wink, particularly on the chances of her running-mate's expiration before the completion of their hypothetical term. But hey, and excuse me, a lot of us were wondering more or less out loud if she could do this without destroying what little chances her party had left for this election. It's not a retreat from our positions, and it's not patriarchal or sexist either, for we Democrats to congratulate her. I certainly could not have done as well as she did, under the same circumstances.
And here's the thing: Joe Biden was all that much better. After weeks of receiving essentially no press (good or bad), Senator Biden seemed to thrive on the unexpected light-footedness of his opponent, only getting stronger as the night unfolded. He'd taken the stage primed with the facts he needed to be swift, decisive, and straight to the point on every issue, and when it became apparent to him that he could deviate from the script without fear of Palin rebuttals, he availed himself with a brand-new variation on Team Blue's most profitable line of attack: He asked the Governor, pointedly and repeatedly, for examples of the ways in which John McCain would differ from George Bush. In doing so he ran straight at the other side's supposed strength (ordinarily a Karl Rove playbook page), in this case the assertion that McCain is a "maverick." And when Palin responded with the only resource she could--an allegation that Obama/Biden were wallowing in the past--Biden didn't take the bait of abandoning the comparisons to George W. Bush, but instead hit them even harder. (Lots of people in this country are going to vote on what has been happening over the past eight years, whether Governor Palin wants them to or not.)
The net beneficiaries of this level of substantive, spirited exchange were the American people, coming as it did on an evening when most of us were expecting a pointless and difficult-to-watch circus. Nobody who watched this debate can say in good faith that they do not understand the policy differences between these two tickets, and nobody who watched this debate can say in good faith that these politicians are all the same, pandering for the television camera, and all of them really just self-animated wind machines spewing unkeepable sound-bite promises back and forth. This debate, quite unexpectedly, was a debate--and all of us are winners to have been some small part of it by watching.
Problem is, when one side is down by five or seven or nine (or, in the case of one national tracker, eleven!) points, a debate after which we can all be proud of the performances of both candidates is really just about the second-furthest thing from helpful that could have happened for the trailing team. True, Governor Palin didn't make things any worse by repeating her Couric-interview performance, but neither did she do anything to reverse the trends in this race, all of which are as grim for her party as any I can remember dating at least as far back as '96. The press, which for weeks had been spinning every story with artificial tightness to fan their fall ratings, has suddenly awakened to the fear that they will seem behind-the-curve on the story of Obama's breakout, and have switched the tone of their reporting (e.g., McCain's pullout in Michigan) accordingly. The McCain message is getting noisier and noisier with bad performances, poor judgment, needless risks and short tempers. The polls themselves are lit-up as blue as the store-closing sale at a K-Mart:
In such an environment, playing Joe Biden to a near-draw wasn't going to be enough. It was by far and away the best the McCain people could've hoped for, but it wasn't going to be enough.
From here the path gets very, very difficult for McCain. The financial sector has turned this election into a referendum on Republican domestic policy, where he could only have won on the foreign policy side of the ledger. The self-inflicted wounds of the past two weeks have left McCain as the defender of his own play-calling, robbing him of the message that Obama is the one who will be reckless and dangerous to elect. And with each passing day, Team Blue widens its advantage on fundraising, ground-game, registered voters, and self confidence. McCain needs a dynamite-charge if he's going to win, and to have even hoped that it could be delivered by Governor Palin was an act far more patriarchal, far more disrespectful, far more sexist, than anything the rest of us could have dreamed up.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
very slightly in favor of the Democrat on the stage--precisely because debates are at least in theory all about substantive policy positions. You can't look the part of the superior policy craftsman if your platform consists of manipulating the low-information voters of the country into despising their own government. An analyst who had only the instant and overnight polls to go by would've concluded that George W. Bush narrowly lost all three debates with Al Gore and then, four years later, narrowly lost all three debates with John Kerry. (Viewed through the correct end of the telescope, I would argue that he lost, at most, two of these--the third debate against Gore and the first debate against Kerry.)
An awareness of this dynamic would have done nothing to ease the pressure on Governor Sarah Palin, facing as she was the enormous challenge of neutralizing her rapidly cementing image as a woman who can't name print media titles or supreme court decisions or give an answer about foreign policy that isn't about the eastern reaches of her home state. As the undercard on a ticket playing as many as eleven points behind last night, with the news getting worse almost by the hour (McCain inexplicably picked Thursday to pull out of Michigan, so that this dreadful news story could compete with whatever performance Palin managed to turn in), the woman who'd been unable to finish the word caricature eight days earlier found herself in an all but no-win situation. In essence she'd been saddled with the job of righting a vessel that was shipping water faster than her boss could bail it out, and with the built-in disadvantage alluded to above, Palin was in a quadruple-hole: the less-important actor on a soggy ticket that nearly always loses debates on first glance, with high personal negatives. Putting her in such a position was nothing short of electoral malpractice on the part of Team Crankypants--something for which they should be hammered in Obama/Biden stump speeches for the pure callousness it self-evidently projects.
That Governor Palin did as well as she did is an accomplishment of which all of us--Republican and Democrat alike--may be proud. It doesn't take agreement with her on... well... anything, to recognize that she didn't just out-perform relative to expectations, she kept the matter relatively close (a far higher standard, given what had been happening for the few days leading up to the event). She was too folksy for my weak constitutions for such nonsense, too quick to flash us a teeth-gritted and obviously fake smile, and way, way, way too quick to wink, particularly on the chances of her running-mate's expiration before the completion of their hypothetical term. But hey, and excuse me, a lot of us were wondering more or less out loud if she could do this without destroying what little chances her party had left for this election. It's not a retreat from our positions, and it's not patriarchal or sexist either, for we Democrats to congratulate her. I certainly could not have done as well as she did, under the same circumstances.
And here's the thing: Joe Biden was all that much better. After weeks of receiving essentially no press (good or bad), Senator Biden seemed to thrive on the unexpected light-footedness of his opponent, only getting stronger as the night unfolded. He'd taken the stage primed with the facts he needed to be swift, decisive, and straight to the point on every issue, and when it became apparent to him that he could deviate from the script without fear of Palin rebuttals, he availed himself with a brand-new variation on Team Blue's most profitable line of attack: He asked the Governor, pointedly and repeatedly, for examples of the ways in which John McCain would differ from George Bush. In doing so he ran straight at the other side's supposed strength (ordinarily a Karl Rove playbook page), in this case the assertion that McCain is a "maverick." And when Palin responded with the only resource she could--an allegation that Obama/Biden were wallowing in the past--Biden didn't take the bait of abandoning the comparisons to George W. Bush, but instead hit them even harder. (Lots of people in this country are going to vote on what has been happening over the past eight years, whether Governor Palin wants them to or not.)
The net beneficiaries of this level of substantive, spirited exchange were the American people, coming as it did on an evening when most of us were expecting a pointless and difficult-to-watch circus. Nobody who watched this debate can say in good faith that they do not understand the policy differences between these two tickets, and nobody who watched this debate can say in good faith that these politicians are all the same, pandering for the television camera, and all of them really just self-animated wind machines spewing unkeepable sound-bite promises back and forth. This debate, quite unexpectedly, was a debate--and all of us are winners to have been some small part of it by watching.
Problem is, when one side is down by five or seven or nine (or, in the case of one national tracker, eleven!) points, a debate after which we can all be proud of the performances of both candidates is really just about the second-furthest thing from helpful that could have happened for the trailing team. True, Governor Palin didn't make things any worse by repeating her Couric-interview performance, but neither did she do anything to reverse the trends in this race, all of which are as grim for her party as any I can remember dating at least as far back as '96. The press, which for weeks had been spinning every story with artificial tightness to fan their fall ratings, has suddenly awakened to the fear that they will seem behind-the-curve on the story of Obama's breakout, and have switched the tone of their reporting (e.g., McCain's pullout in Michigan) accordingly. The McCain message is getting noisier and noisier with bad performances, poor judgment, needless risks and short tempers. The polls themselves are lit-up as blue as the store-closing sale at a K-Mart:
In such an environment, playing Joe Biden to a near-draw wasn't going to be enough. It was by far and away the best the McCain people could've hoped for, but it wasn't going to be enough.
From here the path gets very, very difficult for McCain. The financial sector has turned this election into a referendum on Republican domestic policy, where he could only have won on the foreign policy side of the ledger. The self-inflicted wounds of the past two weeks have left McCain as the defender of his own play-calling, robbing him of the message that Obama is the one who will be reckless and dangerous to elect. And with each passing day, Team Blue widens its advantage on fundraising, ground-game, registered voters, and self confidence. McCain needs a dynamite-charge if he's going to win, and to have even hoped that it could be delivered by Governor Palin was an act far more patriarchal, far more disrespectful, far more sexist, than anything the rest of us could have dreamed up.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Thursday, October 2, 2008
VP Debate Live Blog (Hit Refresh for New Posts)
FINAL THOUGHTS: Palin didn't hurt her ticket, but they were eleven points down when this started. She had to do more than that.
10:30PM - Biden comes back with a bare-bones, stripped down, close-the-deal pitch to Joe Lunchbox, and, once again, scores. I love this man. He's a Democrat and he's not afraid of being a Democrat and he's not going to roll over and play dead when the other side tries to pull this smug, bully nonsense. I give the event to Biden 4-1, with Palin winning on the troop funding thing.
10:28PM - The "without the filter" nonsense isn't going to play. People saw Palin being unable to answer those questions posed to her by Katie Couric, and they KNOW it didn't have anything to do with filters.
10:27PM - I love the "don't question their motive" answer from Biden, but he could have brought it back to respecting McCain. Palin's answer certainly doesn't sound like an overture to bipartisanship, at all.
10:25PM - Biden turns his answer about change into the Judiciary, and scores points seamlessly, Palin, on the other hand, looks like she's bitching about not getting something passed. She sounds a lot like Bush when he was asked if he's made any mistakes.
10:22PM - Biden is as sick of hearing the "maverick" thing, as the rest of us are. Only problem is that he's left himself open to the charge that the things McCain has differed with Bush on aren't important, and one of them is torture.
10:21PM - Palin says "Maverick" again, and the ticket drops another point in the polls? Biden's gonna ask her how McCain isn't George Bush III, AGAIN.
10:19PM - Palin calls herself and her running mate reformers, again, which makes people like me want to shoot ourselves. Biden comes back with some strange personal narrative stuff, but in the end it comes around to being a single parent and... sorry, Republicans, that choke-up was totally genuine.
10:18PM - Another terrific question from Ififl. Does each of these people have a weakness that we don't know about? Gosh, I'm glad I'm not up there right now. Palin's trying to emote with the WalMart crowd (and probably does a little), and in the process reminds us how little she's reminded us of McCain at the top of the ticket.
10:16PM - Ifil wants to press Palin on Cheney's interpretation on the VP job, and Palin just strings bullshit syllables about being an executive. She hasn't done this very much tonight so she'll probably get away with it. Biden comes out swinging on Cheney, and he makes Palin looks like an idiot without calling her an idiot, because he answers the question.
10:15PM - Biden gives a great answer on how he was sold on being Obama's VP.
10:13PM - And this question goes to Gwyn Ifil, for asking both of them a tough question about the position of the Vice Presidency. Palin stumbles on her zinger-line, which makes her look bitchy, and then goes all wonky with her last minute.
10:12PM - What is she talking about? No Child Left Behind?
10:11PM - "Say it ain't so, Joe," and "doggone it" isn't going to play, I don't think. People want change, and they don't get it from someone who can't acknowledge that anything's wrong.
10:10PM - Biden is ready to draw the distinction between change vs. more of the same, and he's going to score big with this.
10:07PM - The middle class policy is a great answer, and so is the getting-us-out-of-Iraq answer, and so is the emoting directly to the camera on how big the stakes are. Palin's on, now, and let's see how she does: This "maverick" thing is not going to play much longer with the public, I don't think. People are coming over to the Obama/Biden ticket and Palin's not going to win them back by calling herself a maverick.
10:06PM - Palin is playing this hand about Biden and Obama and McCain on Iraq very, very hard -- she's not going to get what she wants out of it, but it doesn't always matter because she looks tough.
10:05PM - Will Palin turn around and call it "straight talk" that she can't answer Biden's point on McCain's Iraq policy?
10:03PM - "I'm a Washington outsider" is a set-piece, and those grins at the camera make it look like she thinks she's scoring points, which is making her look arrogant (and wrong). Biden did a great answer on this subject and it wasn't a for-it-before-he-was-against-it answer, at all.
10:01PM - Great answer on "having the stomach for success," because that brings it back to the failed track-record of the guys in charge. Biden is ready on the vote for use-of-force question before Palin even brings it up.
9:59PM - Non-proliferation, by the way, is an example of Obama working across the aisle, which is something the Republicans have said Obama never did. Palin's wrong about the General on the ground in Afghanistan, and the biggest sign that she's struggling is that she left the non-proliferation issue on the table.
9:57PM - Ah, there it is -- Barack Obama as the boogeyman. No worries, Biden comes back with... wait a minute... all the fact and no fear about using them. Again, again, again, again -- Go, Joe, Go! McCain is against the test-ban treaty? Holy shit; I didn't even know that.
9:56PM - Palin surrenders the field on how McCain's policies would differ -- which is all she can do, because they aren't.
9:54PM - The "pointing fingers" issue is not gonna play, precisely because the rest of us are pointing fingers too. Biden isn't going to let her get away with that. He comes back with the question of how John McCain's policies will differ from George Bush's, and delivered in a way that will fit nicely into a soundbites.
9:53PM - Hey, anybody still remember Palin's great answer about Israel? Biden is all over this, and the Jewish vote is going to remember his answer a lot better.
9:51PM - Palin panders to the Jewish vote, but on balance she gives a good answer. Biden is ready for Israel answer, and brings things back to the question Ifil actually asked--which is a nice moment, if anyone notices.
9:49PM - So, let's review: Palin loves diplomacy, but only with people who don't disagree with her? Biden comes back with the facts, and hits her on the contradiction. He knows exactly how to push the thing back our way. I hate to say this (since I was wrong about the first debate, and I thought Obama had lost), but I think Biden is winning this handily. McCain won't sit down with Spain?
9:47PM - You know something? Every time Palin and McCain say "Iraq," we pick up another 100 votes. The "reckless" assertion on peace talks is an old note, and Ifil has hit Palin up about her contradiction.
9:45PM - Pakistan is a fallow field for Biden, especially after Palin hamstrung herself at the cheesesteak factory.
9:43PM - Biden isn't going to let her just keep hitting this same note -- which is how she defeated her opponents in her previous elections.
9:42PM - "Your plan is a white flag of surrender" is only as good as peoples' ability to forget that Biden just pointed out the agreement we have with the Iraqi government on the question.
9:40PM - Palin shows up on the Iraq question loaded for bear on the troop-funding issue. Biden comes back with the plan, and that's great. Then he hits back on the troop-funding question the same way Obama did. This might raise serious questions (again?) on Palin's ability to avoid repeating something that has already been disproven. Biden really stole this one from her--I thought she was going to win this question.
9:39PM - ROUND ONE GOES TO....
Palin did better on the domestic policy stuff than she could have, but she didn't do much to stanch the bleeding.
9:38PM - There's no nuance on the other side and Governor Palin knows it. And Biden just nailed it. He's got Palin dead-to-rights, here.
9:37PM - Biden doesn't hide from same-sex benefits, which is great. No waffling, no nuance, no subtlety. He's got the Constitution on his side, and he knows it. Palin can't respond very well since they have same-sex benefits in Alaska, at least on points. She says she's tolerant, which might play (as long as nobody checks into her speeches).
9:35PM - The "drill, baby drill" clarification is easily the most bizarre moment so far in this event. Besides, the line "It is safe to drill and we need to do more of that" isn't going to resonate nearly as well as the idea of cheaper gas.
9:33PM - Biden is totally ready on this. I can't *BELIEVE* that they didn't prep Palin for the climate change issue. She should have said, "No, I don't think it's man-made," and it would've been less damaging. Biden calls for clean-coal, and points out that McCain voted twenty times against alternative fuel. If Palin doesn't swat that down, it's a commercial tomorrow morning.
9:32PM - She's dodging on the "is it man-made" question, and the American public will get that. She's a Texas Oilman in a skirt, and the public has had quite enough of Texas oilmen for awhile.
9:31PM - Palin *still* isn't ready on the climate change issue???
9:30PM - Palin sounds like she's running for governor of Alaska. Or, at least, running for the job of Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff.
9:27PM - Biden is ready on the bankruptcy bill, and he's ready with the facts about the home mortgage question. Look, folks, at this moment Palin may be getting a few sound-bites, but Biden is winning this thing with anyone who's watching. And after all that grinning about Biden's bankruptcy bill, she comes back with energy? That was bizarre.
9:26PM - Biden gets points on the windfall profits tax, big time. He's up at the high-end of the emotional range where if he gets any more pissed off he'll seem overheated. Palin, meanwhile, says that she would've voted to make it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. She's pandering and I think most people will get that pretty quickly.
9:25PM - I hope Biden comes back to the oversight question, after he gets done skewering Palin on the energy bill.
9:23PM - Here's a question: If you were leaning toward Obama but weren't sold, have you seen anything that changes your mind? Palin is groping for catch-phrases, and she's changing the subject. She scores points by talking about energy but Biden will come back with the truth about Palin's record in Alaska on energy policy.
9:21PM - One risk that had been worried about may be percolating to the surface: is Biden over-playing his hand? I just asked my co-audience if he's winning as much as I think, and they said "yes."
9:20PM - Biden is ready on the small business tax increase, and he's ready on the $5000 health care plan, and he's completely unafraid. He's talking directly to the audience, he's got the numbers, and he's kicking ass.
9:19PM - Palin's been prepped with the small business answer, but the "higher taxes is patriotic" line is something Biden never actually said, and addressing government in the second-person singular makes her look silly. The health care follow-up isn't getting back to McCain's position on oversight. Biden's "I don't know where to start" is terrific.
9:16PM - Pardon my French, but I love that Biden isn't pussy-footing around with this smug bitch. She's why the rest of us are Democrats, and he's not about to let her walk all over him as they'd suggested he would.
9:15PM - Palin just refused, openly, to respond to the charge that McCain didn't support government oversight until last week, and came back with gibberish. Her first Katie Couric moment.
9:14PM - Palin comes back with tax policy? Biden's loaded for bear -- and he's coming back with the fact that Palin didn't answer the question.
9:12PM - Biden's been prepping for the deregulation. The public is learning that McCain is not a champion of government oversight, and Biden pressed the point, perfectly.
9:09PM - Palin is wrong in her use of "predator lender" as a figure of speech, that's not who made this mess; that's a completely different group of institutions. Also, Biden knows what her running-mate's record is on government oversight.
9:05PM Biden's right, the follow-up was completely forgotten about by Ifil, and Biden is hitting this very hard and he's right. Palin's coming across smug and most people know what McCain meant when he said the fundamentals of the economy are strong. The wink, in particular, is a problem.
9:03PM Biden Comes Out Swinging -- great opening with the failed economic policies, including a dig on deregulation. Palin appears to be grinning to herself, like a smug, know-it-all bully from the right wing, which is what she is. She comes on with the soccer-game narrative, which is a comfortable opening for her and follows it up with fear-mongering. Certainly she doesn't sound like the same person who couldn't name a print media source a few days ago. She's wrong about John McCain, though, on the question of his position on oversight.
9:00PM ROUND ZERO GOES TO....
Nice gesture on the part of Governor Palin, if you heard it: "Can I call you Joe?" Very classy. Joe wasn't so bad, either. Click Here to Read More...
10:30PM - Biden comes back with a bare-bones, stripped down, close-the-deal pitch to Joe Lunchbox, and, once again, scores. I love this man. He's a Democrat and he's not afraid of being a Democrat and he's not going to roll over and play dead when the other side tries to pull this smug, bully nonsense. I give the event to Biden 4-1, with Palin winning on the troop funding thing.
10:28PM - The "without the filter" nonsense isn't going to play. People saw Palin being unable to answer those questions posed to her by Katie Couric, and they KNOW it didn't have anything to do with filters.
10:27PM - I love the "don't question their motive" answer from Biden, but he could have brought it back to respecting McCain. Palin's answer certainly doesn't sound like an overture to bipartisanship, at all.
10:25PM - Biden turns his answer about change into the Judiciary, and scores points seamlessly, Palin, on the other hand, looks like she's bitching about not getting something passed. She sounds a lot like Bush when he was asked if he's made any mistakes.
10:22PM - Biden is as sick of hearing the "maverick" thing, as the rest of us are. Only problem is that he's left himself open to the charge that the things McCain has differed with Bush on aren't important, and one of them is torture.
10:21PM - Palin says "Maverick" again, and the ticket drops another point in the polls? Biden's gonna ask her how McCain isn't George Bush III, AGAIN.
10:19PM - Palin calls herself and her running mate reformers, again, which makes people like me want to shoot ourselves. Biden comes back with some strange personal narrative stuff, but in the end it comes around to being a single parent and... sorry, Republicans, that choke-up was totally genuine.
10:18PM - Another terrific question from Ififl. Does each of these people have a weakness that we don't know about? Gosh, I'm glad I'm not up there right now. Palin's trying to emote with the WalMart crowd (and probably does a little), and in the process reminds us how little she's reminded us of McCain at the top of the ticket.
10:16PM - Ifil wants to press Palin on Cheney's interpretation on the VP job, and Palin just strings bullshit syllables about being an executive. She hasn't done this very much tonight so she'll probably get away with it. Biden comes out swinging on Cheney, and he makes Palin looks like an idiot without calling her an idiot, because he answers the question.
10:15PM - Biden gives a great answer on how he was sold on being Obama's VP.
10:13PM - And this question goes to Gwyn Ifil, for asking both of them a tough question about the position of the Vice Presidency. Palin stumbles on her zinger-line, which makes her look bitchy, and then goes all wonky with her last minute.
10:12PM - What is she talking about? No Child Left Behind?
10:11PM - "Say it ain't so, Joe," and "doggone it" isn't going to play, I don't think. People want change, and they don't get it from someone who can't acknowledge that anything's wrong.
10:10PM - Biden is ready to draw the distinction between change vs. more of the same, and he's going to score big with this.
10:07PM - The middle class policy is a great answer, and so is the getting-us-out-of-Iraq answer, and so is the emoting directly to the camera on how big the stakes are. Palin's on, now, and let's see how she does: This "maverick" thing is not going to play much longer with the public, I don't think. People are coming over to the Obama/Biden ticket and Palin's not going to win them back by calling herself a maverick.
10:06PM - Palin is playing this hand about Biden and Obama and McCain on Iraq very, very hard -- she's not going to get what she wants out of it, but it doesn't always matter because she looks tough.
10:05PM - Will Palin turn around and call it "straight talk" that she can't answer Biden's point on McCain's Iraq policy?
10:03PM - "I'm a Washington outsider" is a set-piece, and those grins at the camera make it look like she thinks she's scoring points, which is making her look arrogant (and wrong). Biden did a great answer on this subject and it wasn't a for-it-before-he-was-against-it answer, at all.
10:01PM - Great answer on "having the stomach for success," because that brings it back to the failed track-record of the guys in charge. Biden is ready on the vote for use-of-force question before Palin even brings it up.
9:59PM - Non-proliferation, by the way, is an example of Obama working across the aisle, which is something the Republicans have said Obama never did. Palin's wrong about the General on the ground in Afghanistan, and the biggest sign that she's struggling is that she left the non-proliferation issue on the table.
9:57PM - Ah, there it is -- Barack Obama as the boogeyman. No worries, Biden comes back with... wait a minute... all the fact and no fear about using them. Again, again, again, again -- Go, Joe, Go! McCain is against the test-ban treaty? Holy shit; I didn't even know that.
9:56PM - Palin surrenders the field on how McCain's policies would differ -- which is all she can do, because they aren't.
9:54PM - The "pointing fingers" issue is not gonna play, precisely because the rest of us are pointing fingers too. Biden isn't going to let her get away with that. He comes back with the question of how John McCain's policies will differ from George Bush's, and delivered in a way that will fit nicely into a soundbites.
9:53PM - Hey, anybody still remember Palin's great answer about Israel? Biden is all over this, and the Jewish vote is going to remember his answer a lot better.
9:51PM - Palin panders to the Jewish vote, but on balance she gives a good answer. Biden is ready for Israel answer, and brings things back to the question Ifil actually asked--which is a nice moment, if anyone notices.
9:49PM - So, let's review: Palin loves diplomacy, but only with people who don't disagree with her? Biden comes back with the facts, and hits her on the contradiction. He knows exactly how to push the thing back our way. I hate to say this (since I was wrong about the first debate, and I thought Obama had lost), but I think Biden is winning this handily. McCain won't sit down with Spain?
9:47PM - You know something? Every time Palin and McCain say "Iraq," we pick up another 100 votes. The "reckless" assertion on peace talks is an old note, and Ifil has hit Palin up about her contradiction.
9:45PM - Pakistan is a fallow field for Biden, especially after Palin hamstrung herself at the cheesesteak factory.
9:43PM - Biden isn't going to let her just keep hitting this same note -- which is how she defeated her opponents in her previous elections.
9:42PM - "Your plan is a white flag of surrender" is only as good as peoples' ability to forget that Biden just pointed out the agreement we have with the Iraqi government on the question.
9:40PM - Palin shows up on the Iraq question loaded for bear on the troop-funding issue. Biden comes back with the plan, and that's great. Then he hits back on the troop-funding question the same way Obama did. This might raise serious questions (again?) on Palin's ability to avoid repeating something that has already been disproven. Biden really stole this one from her--I thought she was going to win this question.
9:39PM - ROUND ONE GOES TO....
Palin did better on the domestic policy stuff than she could have, but she didn't do much to stanch the bleeding.
9:38PM - There's no nuance on the other side and Governor Palin knows it. And Biden just nailed it. He's got Palin dead-to-rights, here.
9:37PM - Biden doesn't hide from same-sex benefits, which is great. No waffling, no nuance, no subtlety. He's got the Constitution on his side, and he knows it. Palin can't respond very well since they have same-sex benefits in Alaska, at least on points. She says she's tolerant, which might play (as long as nobody checks into her speeches).
9:35PM - The "drill, baby drill" clarification is easily the most bizarre moment so far in this event. Besides, the line "It is safe to drill and we need to do more of that" isn't going to resonate nearly as well as the idea of cheaper gas.
9:33PM - Biden is totally ready on this. I can't *BELIEVE* that they didn't prep Palin for the climate change issue. She should have said, "No, I don't think it's man-made," and it would've been less damaging. Biden calls for clean-coal, and points out that McCain voted twenty times against alternative fuel. If Palin doesn't swat that down, it's a commercial tomorrow morning.
9:32PM - She's dodging on the "is it man-made" question, and the American public will get that. She's a Texas Oilman in a skirt, and the public has had quite enough of Texas oilmen for awhile.
9:31PM - Palin *still* isn't ready on the climate change issue???
9:30PM - Palin sounds like she's running for governor of Alaska. Or, at least, running for the job of Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff.
9:27PM - Biden is ready on the bankruptcy bill, and he's ready with the facts about the home mortgage question. Look, folks, at this moment Palin may be getting a few sound-bites, but Biden is winning this thing with anyone who's watching. And after all that grinning about Biden's bankruptcy bill, she comes back with energy? That was bizarre.
9:26PM - Biden gets points on the windfall profits tax, big time. He's up at the high-end of the emotional range where if he gets any more pissed off he'll seem overheated. Palin, meanwhile, says that she would've voted to make it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. She's pandering and I think most people will get that pretty quickly.
9:25PM - I hope Biden comes back to the oversight question, after he gets done skewering Palin on the energy bill.
9:23PM - Here's a question: If you were leaning toward Obama but weren't sold, have you seen anything that changes your mind? Palin is groping for catch-phrases, and she's changing the subject. She scores points by talking about energy but Biden will come back with the truth about Palin's record in Alaska on energy policy.
9:21PM - One risk that had been worried about may be percolating to the surface: is Biden over-playing his hand? I just asked my co-audience if he's winning as much as I think, and they said "yes."
9:20PM - Biden is ready on the small business tax increase, and he's ready on the $5000 health care plan, and he's completely unafraid. He's talking directly to the audience, he's got the numbers, and he's kicking ass.
9:19PM - Palin's been prepped with the small business answer, but the "higher taxes is patriotic" line is something Biden never actually said, and addressing government in the second-person singular makes her look silly. The health care follow-up isn't getting back to McCain's position on oversight. Biden's "I don't know where to start" is terrific.
9:16PM - Pardon my French, but I love that Biden isn't pussy-footing around with this smug bitch. She's why the rest of us are Democrats, and he's not about to let her walk all over him as they'd suggested he would.
9:15PM - Palin just refused, openly, to respond to the charge that McCain didn't support government oversight until last week, and came back with gibberish. Her first Katie Couric moment.
9:14PM - Palin comes back with tax policy? Biden's loaded for bear -- and he's coming back with the fact that Palin didn't answer the question.
9:12PM - Biden's been prepping for the deregulation. The public is learning that McCain is not a champion of government oversight, and Biden pressed the point, perfectly.
9:09PM - Palin is wrong in her use of "predator lender" as a figure of speech, that's not who made this mess; that's a completely different group of institutions. Also, Biden knows what her running-mate's record is on government oversight.
9:05PM Biden's right, the follow-up was completely forgotten about by Ifil, and Biden is hitting this very hard and he's right. Palin's coming across smug and most people know what McCain meant when he said the fundamentals of the economy are strong. The wink, in particular, is a problem.
9:03PM Biden Comes Out Swinging -- great opening with the failed economic policies, including a dig on deregulation. Palin appears to be grinning to herself, like a smug, know-it-all bully from the right wing, which is what she is. She comes on with the soccer-game narrative, which is a comfortable opening for her and follows it up with fear-mongering. Certainly she doesn't sound like the same person who couldn't name a print media source a few days ago. She's wrong about John McCain, though, on the question of his position on oversight.
9:00PM ROUND ZERO GOES TO....
Nice gesture on the part of Governor Palin, if you heard it: "Can I call you Joe?" Very classy. Joe wasn't so bad, either. Click Here to Read More...
Breaking News: Palin Plans to Attack Biden
The word around the schoolyard is that Palin's strategy tonight will be to confront Biden on his voting record in the Senate -- notably on the fact that he voted *for* the use of force in Iraq in 2002 when his boss doesn't think it was a vote he would've made (had he been there). This is an interesting development since it has a reasonable chance of working: Biden has been prepping for over a week now on the presumption that he must not be too hard on Palin or risk coming across as a bully--and now here she is, apparently planning to make him look weak unless he can adjust in mid-stream.
All debate strategies are inherently gambles because there's no way to know for sure what the other person will say or how they'll react to what you say, but Palin has proven that she can, at the very least, read a speech off of a teleprompter that attacks the other ticket with the very kind of savage vitriol that Vice Presidential nominees are supposed to bring to the process, generally. Senator Biden will have to make a (presumably) un-rehearsed course correction, which in turn could lead to him mis-speaking, and the next thing you know we could all be talking tomorrow morning not about what Palin said tonight but what Biden said tonight--which is the only way he can lose.
You've gotta hand it to 'em, frankly: The Republicans are very, very good at all of this. They've looked pretty disorganized and reactive since the Lehman collapse two Mondays ago, but it's been an eighteen-day run for Obama with no real fear of the other side doing anything other than shooting itself in the foot; it had to stop sometime. (Never mind the fact that Palin may be wearing an earpiece, something she wasn't doing for her interviews with Katie Couric.)
Does all of this mean that Palin will win the debate? Am I predicting the biggest oratory upset in modern electoral history? No. But with this afternoon's announcement from the Palin camp I do now think the performances will be much more closely matched than I'd been anticipating before, and that will form the basis of a "kind of" win for Palin. I remain steadfast in my assertion that Obama's lead is so structural right now that a lackluster debate performance by Biden is almost physically precluded from hurting him, but Palin just might turn a corner on hurting her own team this evening--and the way things have been going for them, that would still be a pretty big improvement.
Things to watch:
Whatever happens, I'm as keyed-up and ready for all of it as you are. Stay tuned....
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
All debate strategies are inherently gambles because there's no way to know for sure what the other person will say or how they'll react to what you say, but Palin has proven that she can, at the very least, read a speech off of a teleprompter that attacks the other ticket with the very kind of savage vitriol that Vice Presidential nominees are supposed to bring to the process, generally. Senator Biden will have to make a (presumably) un-rehearsed course correction, which in turn could lead to him mis-speaking, and the next thing you know we could all be talking tomorrow morning not about what Palin said tonight but what Biden said tonight--which is the only way he can lose.
You've gotta hand it to 'em, frankly: The Republicans are very, very good at all of this. They've looked pretty disorganized and reactive since the Lehman collapse two Mondays ago, but it's been an eighteen-day run for Obama with no real fear of the other side doing anything other than shooting itself in the foot; it had to stop sometime. (Never mind the fact that Palin may be wearing an earpiece, something she wasn't doing for her interviews with Katie Couric.)
Does all of this mean that Palin will win the debate? Am I predicting the biggest oratory upset in modern electoral history? No. But with this afternoon's announcement from the Palin camp I do now think the performances will be much more closely matched than I'd been anticipating before, and that will form the basis of a "kind of" win for Palin. I remain steadfast in my assertion that Obama's lead is so structural right now that a lackluster debate performance by Biden is almost physically precluded from hurting him, but Palin just might turn a corner on hurting her own team this evening--and the way things have been going for them, that would still be a pretty big improvement.
Things to watch:
- Does Palin look comfortable when she takes the stage? This could tell a big part of the story, since (like the rest of us) she seems most likely to blunder when she's feeling pressed
- Does Gwyn Ifil bend too far over backward to prove she's being fair to Palin, by scuttling some of her toughest questions at the last minute?
- Does Biden say "The Governor is right," the way Obama said "John is right," at the risk of a venomous RNC commercial suggesting that the two of them are pansies?
- If Palin attacks Biden, will he react on the fly or stick to the script, and which one will seem more effectual, afterward? Will he look weak by sticking to the script, or will he gaffe by improvising?
- Will anything memorable happen? By which I mean, more memorable than happened at the first debate? At the water-cooler tomorrow, will Governor Palin's performance be thought of in the same light as this one?
Whatever happens, I'm as keyed-up and ready for all of it as you are. Stay tuned....
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Anybody Remeber Being Nervous About Biden?
------
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I WILL BE LIVE-BLOGGING THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE STARTING AT 9:00PM, EASTERN TIME, THURSDAY OCTOBER 2.
------
As the appointed hour of what surely has to be the most anticipated Vice Presidential debate in history fast approaches, one question on this author's mind is whether anyone remembers how nervous we were all supposed to be about the gaffe-potential coming from Joe Biden. As noted previously in this column, it seems like a very long time ago indeed when Biden was the man for whose extemporaneous remarks we all caught ourselves waiting with held breath. Obviously the pre-game talk surrounding this debate is all about Sarah Palin--though unfortunately for Senator McCain, this is not for the same reason that it was on the day he picked her, or the day most of a week later when she gave her rousingly venomous and willfully counterfactual convention speech.
No, these days the talk is all about just how bad the event might ultimately turn out to be, not just for her but for the slender remaining electoral chances of her boss. In less than a week, Governor Palin has gone from admitting that she can't cite a single working example of McCain's newfound regulatory credential, to dispensing a long-winded and unintelligable monologue on Alaska's proximity to Russia, to contradicting her boss on Pakistan, to being linked to improper receipt of cash gifts while Mayor of Wasilla, to being called upon by CNN Centrist Jack Cafferty and National Review Columnist Kathleen Parker to remove herself from the ticket, to being accused in her own state, by legislators of her own party, of trying to stonewall their investigation into her dismissal of the state's Public Safety Commissioner.
And then, shortly after the hemorrhage on Wall Street this past Monday, the McCain team quietly let slip that there were two additional segments of the Governor's interview with Katie Couric, and that these could be expected to be perhaps even more embarrassing to their candidates than the first pair had been last week--something which, frankly, I hadn't thought was possible. The third segment has now aired, and in it Ms. Palin finds herself unable to cite a single Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade. She is familiar with a great many such decisions, she asks us to believe--she just can't name one. The fourth segment has not yet aired, but in the meantime a leaked clip from that final installment shows Palin strolling with Couric behind the stage at a campaign event, whereupon Couric asks Palin what sources of print media she consults regularly. The answer? You guessed it: She routinely reads them all, she claims, but when pressed she cannot name a single print media source. Not one. Not the New York Times, not Life Magazine, not The London Daily Mirror. Nothing.
As if the McCain campaign needed a second ring to this horror-circus right now, the rumors about their own internal assessment of Palin have taken on a newsworthyness all its own--with unnamed insiders fretting about the likelihood that the debate will end disastrously, to an extent and with an urgency that no one dared bring to the same question about Dan Quayle, way back in '88. Meanwhile, Senator McCain himself is growing even more visibly testy than he's been acting for months already, as the questions about his choice of doubles-partner get more and more pointed and more and more prevalent in his dealings with the press. In a taped meeting yesterday with the Editorial Board of the Des Moines Register (and, entirely by the way, Mike Murphy has a right-wing commentary about the insanity of his wayward candidate even being in Iowa, at this point in the campaign), Mr. McCain became so visibly frustrated with the questions he was fielding about Palin that at some point it became less than wholly obvious that the matter wouldn't come to blows.
Clearly the bloom is off the rose, and Governor Palin is largely and personally to blame. Her truthfulness has been widely exposed as, well, as not very distinguished, and when cornered she tends to clutch and find herself blurting sentence-fragments that don't actually have anything to do with the question. There are still a great many people in this country who enthusiastically support her (or, perhaps more accurately, who support what she stands for), and for this reason it seems unlikely that she will not still be on the Republican ticket on November 4th--but scarcely anyone still expects her to scorch the paint from the walls in her head-to-head match-up with Senator Biden, the way they might have on the Wednesday of her coming-out party in Minneapolis.
Many of my fellow-columnists have argued that these are just the sorts of low expectations from which a candidate may be expected to benefit when assessing her performance after-the-fact: If she isn't expected to be able to finish a single sentence, so the argument goes, every single sentence she completes will earn her disproportionate victory-points with a persuadable audience. On the surface it's a solid argument in favor of expecting Palin to out-perform and, by that measure, possibly even "win."
The problem for the Alaska Governor is that not all low expectations are created equal. Candidates who've revealed a weakness in the oratory department are often blessed with favorable receptions after debates in which they've fought their loquaciously superior opponents to near draws, but these tend in my experience to be candidates who have other core strengths, have already cemented a lasting connection with the low-information voters in the middle, and, most importantly, don't actually scare people half to death every time they open their mouths.
Ms. Palin fits into a completely different category--one in which the low expectations will be all the more difficult to overcome, the lower they go. Each time she sinks herself deeper into the quicksand of her own incompetence, the public subconsciously raises, rather than lowers, its threshold for giving her another chance; she's just that bad. When Jack Cafferty calls you "pathetic" while sitting right next to Wolf Blitzer, and then shouts Blitzer down when he tries to temper the comment with a qualifier, you know you're playing from behind.
And yet, it occurred to me this morning that there's a way the McCain team could still make lemonade out of this bad sitcom in which they've found themselves. It's risky, but at this point it would seem to be the only option they have left: They could let her out of the box.
When someone is short on factual knowledge but long on ideology, they win debates by falling back on ideology for every answer. That hasn't worked for Palin because when she trusts her ideological instincts (e.g., Pakistan), she contradicts the campaign. So that's a minus, right? Well, only because of how they've played the campaign chemistry to date. If the surrogates had spent the first two weeks of Palin's inclusion on the team by saying, "Look, she's going to speak from her own heart, saying exactly what she thinks even if she disagrees with McCain, and the reason she's going to do that is because she's a strong woman and Senator McCain respects a fellow maverick," then they'd have been playing to their own strong suit (the whole "maverick" nonsense), and could have even woven-in some of that whole "no, you're the sexist, here" baloney that seemed to be playing at the convention.
If the past ten days have shown anything, it's that when the McCain people try the opposite tack--when they try to imbue Palin with high-enough command of the minutia of the campaign's position on each issue, blow-by-blow, it ends in catastrophe. Their only choice is to let her trust her instincts.
The risk, of course, is that her instincts are so ideologically different from McCain's (and those of the rest of planet earth), that she could easily trust herself a little too much and end up saying something that really, really, really does sink the tattered remnants of McCain's candidacy for President--but that's a risk that Team Crankypants can no longer pretend to neutralize by forcing Palin to be somebody she's not. The McCain campaign isn't just stuck with Palin on the ticket; they're stuck with Palin, the individual--her narrative, her style, her selling points and her demons. All Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates are human, it would seem, but some of them are more human than others. The McCain people have to recognize this fact in a far more strategic way if they are to have the tiniest chance of turning Thursday evening's event to their advantage.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Contrasting Viewpoints on the Bailout
THE KEY GRIP NOTES: The first of these two essays on the subject was submitted to me by a loyal reader named Alan G. The second is authored by The Key Grip himself.
And make no mistake, this is a loss that no modern industrial society can afford even to joke about: companies base their decisions on whether to undertake some future activity on the basis of "Return on Funds Employed," meaning that virtually no expansion, no new product development, no r&d, can be justified without leverage. In the world of today, I borrow 80% of the money I need to build my factory, confident that the revenue stream created by the project will be adequate to cash-flow the debt service, and the resulting profit that comes back to me and me alone is magnified by a factor of five, since I don't owe any of the profits to my creditor. Without the creditor, I undertake no projects whose profitability isn't expected to be five times higher -- which is none of them.
With apologies to my learned readers, the Government must act. (A reality perhaps brought closer to home by the impact of Monday's blood-letting on our 401K's?) This is not the question. The question is, in what form should that action take? And here is where we Democrats have a grand and non-negotiable responsibility to undo some of the desperate mistakes that have gotten us to this moment in the first place. The government must re-institute the Glass/Steagall Act, at once. An industry as irreplaceable as I have argued this one is, and as based on pure conjecture, cannot be trusted to its own devices. We need powerful regulatory oversight, and we need it now.
We also need any expensive bill to address the greed-induced fallout not just at the top of this pyramid of greed, but at the bottom. Personally I think it's foolish to buy a house that one cannot afford, with principal-and-interest payments that one cannot possibly make (once they kick-in) on the blind hope that the house will be worth more by the time any of those bills have to be paid. Indeed I don't think it's foolish; I think it's pathetic. But it's no more foolish or pathetic than a $50,000,000 CEO signing-off on the idea of securitizing those peoples' stupidities into a portfolios of worthless assets, and then selling them under the cover of a triple-A rating. If we're going to bail out the stupid people at the top, in other words, I see no reason not to bail out the stupid people at the bottom. Handling home mortgage defaults in bankruptcy court (and repealing the current bankruptcy law altogether) would be a start.
Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid have these opportunities, now, precisely because the Republican minority in the House balked at their first, best chance for compromise. After the way their efforts were rewarded in the markets on Monday, they wouldn't dare filibuster any second attempt when at last it found its way over to the Senate. Our duty as rank-and-file Democrats, then, is to press the issue with our legislators. We need a bailout bill, yes, but we need to restore sanity to the very places in which its absence led to such shenanigans in the first place.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
THE GREAT SHAKEDOWN
The puppets of Wall Street are about to engage in the greatest robbery in US history.
George Bush and Henry Paulson's bailout of Wall Street does no more than rob the US people while they still have some money, before we fall over the cliff of a tortuous economic decline. The only positive to come from the crisis is to starkly show who our politicians represent - the wealthiest and most powerful 1 %.
The last 28 years has seen an orthodoxy reign in Washington. The orthodoxy that private interests will best solve the problems of society, so long as the private interests can be persuaded they will make a financial killing. More recently this was compounded by the myopic view of economic thinkers in government, academia and television that the US system guaranteed growth. The financial system concluded that if growth was guaranteed, and in housing backed up by Uncle Sam'a guarantee, then bet on that future growth with CREDIT. These cheerleaders of the free market became involved in a Roman orgy of easy credit and speculation on that credit. Now the chickens have come home to roost and they are seeing that they made money from the most toxic poison of capitalism: bad money.
After 8 years in power, the Bush response is seen by people for what it is: another money and power grab by the rich. The audacity of the Democrats in grabbing hold of Bush's sinking ship is astounding. Since they finally woke up and discovered the war was a lie, they have posed as if he was their mortal enemy and now we are supposed to kiss and make up while we put generations of working people in hock to the government simply to hand out free money to Paulson's former employers.
The sheer injustice of this bailout is plain to see. Robbing the bottom 95% to give to the top 1%. This plan also can not achieve what Bernanke and Paulson want. It will solve the banks' liquidity problems in the short term. Liquidity means cash by the way. Your money can help the banks' cash balance. The other condition the banks need before they start lending to individuals and businesses is to believe that conditions will exist for the lendee to earn enough over the medium term to be able to pay the loan and interest back so the bank will make a profit on the loan.
These banks just woke up from a decade long orgy of easy credit and speculation. They have woken up broke, sick and with a hangover and will not be in a mood to start up the party once more. Their economists know it would be nuts to start lending in the current climate. They have seen the numbers and the numbers shout out the economy is in decline, wrapped in astronomical levels of debt and supporting a government that is rapidly becoming a debt peon to foreign banks. No the financial institutions wont lend to anyone outside of the recipients of the bailout.
What can you do? Wake up and smell the coffee. Read about how this started. If there is a protest, attend. Never trust any politician who votes for this bailout.
Finally, wouldn't it have been better not to have abandoned the idea of a social housing policy. A government that builds modest low cost rentable accommodation for the poor. After all, it's a lot less expensive to bail out the bottom 30% than the top 1%.
Alan G.
Gainesville, Florida
------------------------------------
KARMA IS BEST-SERVED COLD
Many of my most avid readers have been asking me why I seem to be so ready to pass some sort of bailout bill for Wall Street, particularly when the legislation is so unpopular with rank-and-file Americans across all shades of the political spectrum. Few among us aren't at least secretly made happy by stories of the mighty brought low, and, like the GOP sex scandals of 2006, this evolving mess carries with it the potential to bring some very mighty people very, very low indeed. So why not just let it evolve? The answer is simple: We can't weather the consequences. None of us can.
You'd have had to be living in another solar system not to have noticed over the past few days that this economy of ours is a unique animal. Ninety-nine percent of any corporation's total cumulative P/R is spent railing against government intervention and oversight--and then, the moment some large company or "key" industry gets into financial trouble (the automakers, say), the alarm bell is sounded by those same P/R departments, warning us about the terrible consequences to the American worker if some drastic public rescue effort isn't immediately crashed through the halls of Congress.
Most of the time these arguments are pure bunk: Adam Smith didn't say that consumers have a responsibility to buy the shoddy products tumbling from the doors of the factories in their midst; indeed he said rather the opposite--it is the corporations' duty to figure out what it is that the consumer wants, and if those things aren't delivered then the consumer should take his dollar elsewhere. Only in the United States does a consumer stand a more than passing chance of being stopped in the hallway of an indoor shopping mall and asked, as a friend of mine was, recently, why he isn't carrying a larger assortment of shopping bags as evidence that he is doing his part to help the economy.
And make no mistake, this is a loss that no modern industrial society can afford even to joke about: companies base their decisions on whether to undertake some future activity on the basis of "Return on Funds Employed," meaning that virtually no expansion, no new product development, no r&d, can be justified without leverage. In the world of today, I borrow 80% of the money I need to build my factory, confident that the revenue stream created by the project will be adequate to cash-flow the debt service, and the resulting profit that comes back to me and me alone is magnified by a factor of five, since I don't owe any of the profits to my creditor. Without the creditor, I undertake no projects whose profitability isn't expected to be five times higher -- which is none of them.
With apologies to my learned readers, the Government must act. (A reality perhaps brought closer to home by the impact of Monday's blood-letting on our 401K's?) This is not the question. The question is, in what form should that action take? And here is where we Democrats have a grand and non-negotiable responsibility to undo some of the desperate mistakes that have gotten us to this moment in the first place. The government must re-institute the Glass/Steagall Act, at once. An industry as irreplaceable as I have argued this one is, and as based on pure conjecture, cannot be trusted to its own devices. We need powerful regulatory oversight, and we need it now.
We also need any expensive bill to address the greed-induced fallout not just at the top of this pyramid of greed, but at the bottom. Personally I think it's foolish to buy a house that one cannot afford, with principal-and-interest payments that one cannot possibly make (once they kick-in) on the blind hope that the house will be worth more by the time any of those bills have to be paid. Indeed I don't think it's foolish; I think it's pathetic. But it's no more foolish or pathetic than a $50,000,000 CEO signing-off on the idea of securitizing those peoples' stupidities into a portfolios of worthless assets, and then selling them under the cover of a triple-A rating. If we're going to bail out the stupid people at the top, in other words, I see no reason not to bail out the stupid people at the bottom. Handling home mortgage defaults in bankruptcy court (and repealing the current bankruptcy law altogether) would be a start.
Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid have these opportunities, now, precisely because the Republican minority in the House balked at their first, best chance for compromise. After the way their efforts were rewarded in the markets on Monday, they wouldn't dare filibuster any second attempt when at last it found its way over to the Senate. Our duty as rank-and-file Democrats, then, is to press the issue with our legislators. We need a bailout bill, yes, but we need to restore sanity to the very places in which its absence led to such shenanigans in the first place.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
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