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.

I was on a plane last night during the debate. My wife taped it for me. I watched it first thing this morning so that I could see it before hearing or reading any coverage of it. I think the media largely has it wrong. If we were going to judge it like a high school debate, then the media consensus that it was a draw or slight advantage for Obama would be right. But stop and think about this for a minute. This was the foreign policy debate. This was supposed to be McCain’s turf. Obama looked comfortable and confident. He had a clear, easy command of the issues. He stood up to McCain’s attempts to distort his record, his statements, or even to tell outright lies. This is likely the best debate performance we’ll see from McCain. McCain looked hostile and seemed to view Obama with contempt for much of the night. Nothing in Obama’s performance warranted that. I think it makes McCain look small. Obama looked like a guy who can talk about this stuff based on his own knowledge. McCain often looked like he had been programmed to repeat key words and phrases over and over.

The one thing I saw in Obama’s performance last night that bothered me is something I’ve seen in the guy and been bothered by for months. He’s not a finisher. He isn’t willing to really go for the throat to win. I think there were times last night when Obama really could have put McCain away. He didn’t. If we face a close, contested election on November 4th, then I think McCain and his people have the desperation to win that will carry them through. Obama doesn’t. I think we should just hope that Obama can ride out the clock with McCain the way he was able to do with Clinton.

In the next two debates, it should become quite clear that Obama is the better choice. From a political consultant’s point of view, McCain is a nightmare in a town hall format. He’s good with adoring crowds. He’s not good when faced with tough questions by average people. Sometimes he’s not good because he’s snappy and dismissive. Usually, though, he’s not good precisely because of that “straight talking” side of himself. He’ll say what he’s feeling at the moment, what he thinks will make him look good with the crowd regardless of whether it conflicts with his campaign’s message or his own record. Tom Brokaw is capable of and not unlikely to call McCain out on that.

I haven’t really seen this highlighted yet, but it’s been a busy week for me where I haven’t had time to read other political blogs. In a lot of right wing analysis of the current financial meltdown, they seem to be trying to shift the blame to “1930s era regulation” or “depression era regulation”. I’ve seen several McCain surrogates, including Sarah Palin use this formulation this week. It’s impressive, at times, how focused the GOP is on its long term missions. One of those is to completely discredit anything from the New Deal era. That gets easier as fewer and fewer people who were alive during that era are around now to give first hand dispute to that shit. The Republican Party is currently laying the groundwork, rhetorically, to blame this crisis on regulation and set the stage for more deregulation as soon as it is politically palatable. They, of course, have it exactly wrong. It has been the repeal of New Deal era regulation that has led to this. It has been an intentional failure to extend the existing New Deal era regulation to the new financial services that have grown up in my lifetime that has led to this crisis.

New Deal era regulation would have prevented this stuff if it had been left in place.

I am not a big fan of what Chris Matthews has become in the last dozen years. He went down a crazy path during the Clinton administration, particularly during their second term that never went away. I got a great reminder of what brought Matthews to prominence, though, today. He gave a grilling to the GOP spinmeister today about this “lipstick on a pig” crap that would have done any fictional TV prosecutor proud. It was focused, it was relentless. It was completely on point. He’s used clips and quotes of other politicians (and used more Republicans than Democrats) using the same phrase. McCain’s former press secretary wrote a book by that title and McCain himself used the phrase to attack Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign proposal on healthcare. He’s played the commercial three times to refute claims that the ad isn’t trying to say that Obama called Palin a pig.

Let me say this about the ad itself. If you think that Barack Obama was in any way calling Palin a pig, or in any way being sexist in this remark then YOU ARE A MORON. You are too stupid to vote. You’re probably too stupid to tie your own shoes. If you don’t believe that he’s calling her a pig, but are willing to put forth this story as part of a campaign to win the whitehouse, then you are what is wrong with American politics. You are the reason that most people don’t vote. You suck.

I think my previous thought that Palin was a desperate move, a roll of the dice, is proving to have been correct.

September 2, 2008
Disclosures on Palin Raise Questions on Vetting Process
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

ST. PAUL — A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

On Monday morning, Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd, issued a statement saying that their 17-year-old unmarried daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant and that she intended to marry the father.

Among other less attention-grabbing news of the day: it was learned that Ms. Palin now has a private lawyer in a legislative ethics investigation in Alaska into whether she abused her power in dismissing the state’s public safety commissioner; that she was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party, which has at times sought a vote on whether the state should secede; and that Mr. Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge. Read the rest of this entry »

In this presidential election year, I have found that I’m doing most of my writing elsewhere. I think that I need a level of interactivity that a solo blog doesn’t seem to provide. In the event that there’s anyone reading this who isn’t interacting with me elsewhere on the internet, I’ll paste in what I wrote Friday morning, about an hour after McCain announced his choice of Sarah Palin for the veepslot.

I think the pick looks desperate.

Here’s some of what I think McCain was thinking with her pick.

1. Woman! We’ll siphon off some of those Hillary supporters. We’ll steal some of Obama’s thunder as the first African American presidential candidate.

2. “Average Jane”. Not a Washington insider or long time pol, mother of 5, etc.

3. An unexpected pick that will really make news. Reinforces “maverick” image. Palin has some maverick cred of her own on top of that.

5. Husband is blue collar, union member guy. She’s a former union member. Oldest son is in the army. I’m assuming this will be some help in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Why I think it looks desperate:

1. The woman thing is too obvious. The fact that she’s way out of step with where most women fall on most issues should become apparent quickly. It looks a bit hamfisted. It also means the McCain camp has bought into their own spin about how upset women are over Hillary.

2. This pick makes it look like the McCain camp didn’t think they could win with Romney or the other top contenders. It’s a roll of the dice, a supposed game changer that looks kind of desperate.

3. She’s dreadfully inexperienced. That’s the other side of “outsider”. She makes Obama look like Teddy Kennedy. Two years ago, she was the mayor of a small town in Alaska. She’s been governor of Alaska for about 18 months. McCain’s an old man who has recently fought cancer. Look at Sarah Palin and tell me you think she’s really qualified to be on the top of the ticket.

4. Even though she has a record of ethics reform, she’s currently under investigation for a potential abuse of her power as governor. Even if nothing comes of that, it gives the media lots of stories to tell about the wildly corrupt world of Alaska politics these days and her place in it.

5. She has four minor children, the youngest of whom is an infant with down’s syndrome. I think there is a traditionalist segment to the Republican base who may think she should be focused on those kids, especially the special needs infant rather than being vice president. You add to it McCain’s age and health and the possibility that she could actually be president. I think it turns off some of their own base.

6. Who is going to get more media attention on the campaign trail: Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin? You put Hillary out there doing events on the same days as Palin’s big events and she’s an after thought. Hillary could actually relish the role of Palin attack dog.