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.

Gena at Deadly Stealth Frogs has an interesting post about the repeated cover ups of the rapes and murders of female soldiers. It’s worth a read and worth writing to your elected representatives about.

I’m watching Barack Obama give a pretty good speech on patriotism right now. He’s doing a really good job of hitting all the high minded rhetoric of americanism here, including most of the liberal ideas and some recent liberal causes. He also took a shot at moveon.org for their “general betray us” ad.

I don’t like this idea of national service as a requirement for college aid. College aid should come because it’s the right thing to do, both for the citizens who receive it and the country as a whole.

He was speaking from Independence, Mo, so the Truman shout out was inevitable.

I guess you can’t talk about patriotism without bringing up Lincoln and Washington.

Now they cut to a news conference from John McCain. He’s all “I love free trade and Obama doesn’t” in regard to Columbia and the free trade deal, CAFTA, NAFTA, etc. The questioners so far are throwing McCain total softballs a la “Do you think Senator Obama is being hypocritical here” on something in the campaign.

McCain can’t seem to make a statement without saying “we have differences and I look forward to discussing those”.

McCain laughs like a muppet when he’s being a politician. He doesn’t actually laugh, he makes this goofy grin and then rapidly bobs his head up and down.

And now MSNBC appears to be cutting away. End of live blog.

I need to get in the habit of posting here again. My political ramblings have been happening elsewhere lately.

I just watched a clip of Nancy Pelosi giving a press conference yesterday about oil speculators. She said that she and the Democratic leaders assembled behind her were putting the oil speculators on notice. She then said that she’d sent a letter to President Bush asking him to use the FTC’s emergency powers to step in and put a half to this. In my mind, that’s about the same as saying “stop or we’ll stand here impotently shaking our fist at you!”.

Exit polling out of West Virginia looks really bad for Barack Obama. That’s five electoral votes he’s got no chance of winning without putting Hillary on the ticket. Less than 1/3rd of Hillary’s voters in the state say they would vote for Obama in the general. She’s going to be in the neighborhood of a 2 to 1 victory when the total count comes in. That’s about the same margin by which West Virginia voters say they don’t believe Obama shares their basic values. Which red state does Obama pick up to offset those votes?

It may be cliche after the last week, but there’s something very real and very important about the fact that no Democrat has won the presidency without winning West Virginia since 1916.

As soon as “change” became such a big deal around Obama, Hillary should have focused her entire rhetorical response around the idea that what could be bigger change from George W. Bush than Hillary and then enumerate every single thing where she has disagreed with Bush and the Republicans not only for the last 8 years, but the last 30 years. Nothing else she attempted had anything close to the potency of that argument.

Here’s a way for Barack Obama to get to the presidency. A way, not the only way.

Hillary has kind of, perhaps inadvertently, backed herself into a corner with some public statements she made before the Texas and Ohio primaries. If Obama gets the nomination and offers her the VP slot, she pretty much has to take it. Obama’s case to Hillary and the superdelegates should be:

A. What he’s already saying–he won more delegates by vote than her, super delegates shouldn’t overturn that.*

B. He will make Hillary his VP and give her real power. He’ll start by putting her in charge of something major–health care, perhaps. She needs a guarantee of real influence a la Gore and Cheney. I realize this takes a carrot away that he could dangle in front of others, but he won’t need it. An Obama-Clinton ticket is unbeatable. It’s hard for me believe I’m saying that a ticket with a black man and a polarizing white woman on it is unbeatable, but I really think it is.

C. Enlist Gore and Edwards. You don’t necessarily have to announce what position they’ll hold in the administration, but get them out there campaigning and saying they would be honored to serve in any capacity. There are so many ways to use Gore that it nearly makes my head hurt.

D. Find a way to secure one or two high profile GOP endorsements. They’ve got a lot of legislators who are retiring this year. That’s your best bet.

E. Forget about public financing. Obama declared earlier that he would use public financing if the GOP nominee agreed to do so also. John McCain is already knocking him about that. The public financing limit is something like $85 million this year. Considering that Obama raised $40 million in March alone, it’s insane for him to limit himself that way. The extra money he can raise will far outstrip any harm that comes from this bit of hypocrisy.

I keep reading that the federal reserve won’t let us slip into a depression. They point to the “aggressive” cuts in interest rates, etc. You can’t use monetary policy to stave off a depression. If you could, we wouldn’t have slipped into the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve existed back then. It served the same purpose. There have been no major innovations in monetary policy since then. The whole idea that the fed can stop a depression short of giving away money for free is just ridiculous. It’s almost magical thinking.

I get accused a lot of being a Hillary Clinton supporter. Every time it happens, it feels like a through the looking glass moment. I have been somewhat anti-Hillary since the run up to war in Iraq. When you go back into, say 2006, that was a pretty rare position to be in amongst Democrats. That was the point when the “inevitability” story started being written. She had such unprecedented financial support and such strong poll numbers with Democrats and even likely primary voters and caucus goers that she seemed like a shoe in. A lot of the Obama supporters are fanatics. If you are anything less than one of them, you’re against them. Right now that means you’re a Hillary supporter. If you really are an open Hillary supporter then you’re all kinds of terrible things. Every terrible thing they can project onto Hillary gets projected onto her supporters. This may well come back to bite them in the general election. Obama is the likely nominee. He has to contest the remaining primaries, but now is the time for him and his supporters to start trying to bring the Democratic Party back together. That, more than anything, will make him appear presidential.

I expect that Hillary will probably take this thing to the convention. I’m sure she’ll take it at least through May 6th. But it really is time for her to hang it up and get out. The media isn’t going to let this “misspeak” on her trip to Bosnia go away quickly. I was surprised to see them still talking about it this morning on the Today show. I will not be at all surprised if we see other such “misspeak” events brought forward between now and May. We are at the beginning of a spiral that’s going to damage the nominee. We can’t afford to have the Clinton and Obama camps tearing each other down. That’s how we manage to find a way to lose to John McCain.

Mitt Romney is running one of the dumbest commercials on TV right now. It’s an attack on Hillary Clinton. Mr. Romney, Hillary is the least of your problems right now. You can’t even pretend to maybe be the front runner and, hence, above the fray. It’s such a hamfisted attempt at pushing the “we hate Hillary button” that sits blinking on the forehead of most conservatives that I doubt even they will fall for it. The “substance” of the ad is that she’s never run anything–not a city, a business, or any organization of any kind and is, therefore, not qualified to be president. Does anyone buy that? Can anyone look at her biography and not see a smart, capable (perhaps even ruthlessly so) person? Conservatives must see her in that light to be so afraid of her. Does anyone believe she wasn’t intimately involved in the decision making of the first Clinton whitehouse? Worse, though, is a clip of Romney reacting with disbelief to the (never made) claim that Hillary can learn the job on the fly as if she’s on an “internship”. Oh, snap! He said “intern”. heh heh heh heh.

Nearly every damn word and image in the commercial is just wrong.