I’ve been meaning to say something about this for more than a week, but it’s been a bit crazy at work lately. I haven’t had the time to post the many things that have been running through my mind. I’ve said for ages that I would support Obama, would vote for him, but that I wasn’t terribly excited about his candidacy. I think his people did some very sneaky stuff in the spring. Anyone who can make me feel a little bit of sympathy for Hillary Clinton has to be doing something wrong. He won me over in a few sentences as our banking system nearly collapsed over the last few weeks. His declaration that this is the final verdict on nearly 30 years of, for lack of a better term, Reaganomics won me over completely. If he follows through on his pronouncement that trickle down is dead, that tax cuts for the rich and deregulation area dead, then I will be the biggest fan of a President Obama that you can imagine.

Since I got paid the other day, I’m planning on making my first (small) contribution to his campaign after work tomorrow.

There’s still 30 minutes left. Is it just me or is Obama absolutely killing this one? McCain sits there blinking with that forced, hostile half smile on his face, spouting the same talking points we’ve been hearing for weeks. Obama just repeatedly comes back at that stuff with clear, thoughtful, eloquent answers. Why, for example, is McCain coming back to that “spread the wealth” business again 40 minutes after Obama shut that down? Obama just gave a clear, simple explanation of the so-called health plan fine that McCain has been talking up. As soon as he finished, McCain went back to his talking points as if he hadn’t even heard Obama talking.

Am I right here? Does McCain look worse tonight than in the previous two debates?

There are times when I wish I had even rudimentary photoshop skills. I’m so sick of hearing John McCain say “I’ll make ‘em famous” in his earmarks schtick. First, what he means to say is that he’ll make it known which senators and congresspeople are requesting the earmarks. Most of them are already kinda famous. He also never actually mentions the people he’s referring to most of the time, so if you were to follow his construction, he’s usually actually saying that he would make the earmarks themselves famous. Every time I hear him say that, I think that maybe he’s just recently seen Young Guns II and has delusions of being some earmark killing gunslinger, a Senator nee President Billy The Kid. I’d like to see his face photoshopped onto an Emilio Estevez poster from that movie with the “I’ll make ya famous” tagline.

There was an interesting article at Salon.com a few days back about the Jewish vote in Florida. Picking Palin, especially, if the other choice was Liebermann, turns out to have been a really bad move for McCain in south Florida.

I’m gonna go ahead and say it.

If we have a free, fair election and there’s no terrorist attack between then and now, Obama wins this thing.

I know that three and a half weeks is a lifetime in politics. I know Obama could make some major fuckup or McCain could pull some amazing display of political dexterity in that time. I started feeling like this thing was done after McCain’s erratic behavior heading into the first debate. McCain’s response to the whole economic crisis made him look desperate and unable to lead on the biggest concern of the day. I felt confirmed by that in the nasty, unfair, distorted attacks that were being made on Obama around Bill Ayers. I felt it deep in my gut that this stuff was going to turn off moderates, swing voters, independents, affluent suburban types, etc. These are the people that McCain needed to win this thing. The whole logic of a McCain campaign was that his “maverick” (and god am I sick of even hearing that word) image would play well with them. I had long wondered if the hard right tack he took at the end of the primaries to try to shore up his base damaged that possibility. I think this hamfisted attempt at Rovian politics put the nail in his coffin. You don’t do this stuff yourself. You find an independent expenditure group to do it. You’ve gotta stay high minded, optimistic, and self-assured as a candidate for President. When you go negative, there has to be enough of a sheen of substance to it that it doesn’t just get torn apart by the mainstream media. McCain failed on all fronts there.

That would have been enough to make me write this post. But at the close of business here on the west coast, the Alaska legislature brought it home. A unanimous, bipartisan vote says that Sarah Palin abused her power as governor in this troopergate mess. The McCain campaign will try to say that this is a partisan witch hunt. So far, their weak response to this is that it’s not a fair report because the legislature didn’t speak to her. Well, anyone with an internet connection can tell you that’s because she refused to speak to them. There is no way to spin this finding as a partisan thing. It just doesn’t hold up to even the shallowest scrutiny. If you’re thinking that the McCain camp can somehow dump Palin now and make a better pick…well, you’re wrong. Even if she supposedly resigns from the ticket, replacing her makes McCain look even worse. It doesn’t mean they won’t do it, but it puts the lie to McCain’s claims of superior judgment and experience in the most pointed way possible.

If she does stick around, she’s got no credibility as an attack dog with anyone but the most rabid, racist 20% of the Republican base. As we’ve seen earlier today at a McCain rally, McCain is now having to distance himself from those people. He’s already done too good a job of whipping up their worst instincts.

Even I’m not cynical enough to say that the recent Palin interviews were a dastardly way of setting low expectations for her going into the debate. Whether they intended it or not, the Republicans won the expectations game. Honestly, Palin would have had to have been a drooling, nose picking moron, a slack-jawed yokel, in order to have lived down to the expectations that were set for her in the last week. The woman ain’t qualified to be President, but having surpassed expectations last night, it’s likely that the coverage won’t shift back into “should McCain drop her” mode until her next major gaffe.

I worried that having beaten expectations like a red-headed step child, she might also come off as having won the debate simply because she looked like she could walk and talk at the same time. Thankfully, the debate watching public is a little savvier than that. Most of the polls seem to show that Biden won it. Many of them show that by a large margin. Even the Fox poll has it Biden 61, Palin 39 on the question of who won.

The McCain campaign, by the way, pulled out of Michigan. Whatever the spin may be from the McCain campaign on this, it’s a sign that his people don’t see them as having a real shot there. I would expect to see McCain pulling out (or all but doing so) of some other states in the next ten days. The feel, the momentum of this election seem to be moving toward an Obama victory. McCain’s people really need to fight hard in the true swing states in order for him to have a chance. This election is turning into another confirmation of Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy”. The one area where I’ve appreciated the Obama campaign from the beginning was their adherence to that line of thought. After what happened in the 2006 congressionals, if Obama wins and the Dems pick up larger majorities (looking likely) in the House and Senate, we may have a permanent shift away from the way elections have been run for the last several cycles.

There’s an internet thing going around where people post about Supreme Court cases in an effort to educate Sarah Palin on some case other than Roe V. Wade. My choice is one of the most shameful Supreme Court decisions of the last 100 years. No, it’s not Bush v. Gore. It’s Balzac v. Porto Rico. In this case, the Taft Court deprived citizens of U.S. territories of the full protections of the constitution. Plaintiff Jesus Balzac filed the case because he had been denied a trial by jury in a criminal libel case. Under the sixth amendment, all citizens should have that right. So for the nearly four million U.S. citizens who live in Puerto Rico as well as any mainland citizens who visit there, there is no right to a trial by jury if the local statutes don’t demand it. By the language of the decision, the same is true in any U.S. territory or possession. It is unclear whether any constitutional protections apply, based on the language of the decision.