The New Yorker's Endorsement

The editors at the New Yorker have endorsed Barack Obama for president. No surprise. But their endorsement is well-reasoned and excellently written (again, no surprise).
Quote:

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

Obama for President

Andrew Sullivan's treatise on why Americans need to elect Barack Obama as President of the United States. A must-read.

Cheney and Bush, unlike any presidency in American history, have dangerously pushed constitutional government to the brink of collapse. They did not merely assert a unified executive in which actions and regulations reserved to the executive branch were kept free from Congressional and judicial tampering. That is a perfectly defensible position, especially in wartime. They did not merely act in the immediate wake of an emergency to protect American citizens swiftly - again a perfectly legitimate use of executive power, unhampered by Congress or courts. They declared such power to be unlimited; they asserted also that it was as permanent as the emergency they declared; they claimed their dictatorial powers were inherent in the presidency itself, and above any legal constraints; they ordered their own lawyers to provide retroactive and laughable legal immunity for their crimes; they by-passed all the usual and necessary checks within the executive branch to ensure prudence and legality and self-doubt in the conduct of a war; they asserted that emergency war powers applied to the territory of the United States itself; they claimed the right to seize anyone - anyone, citizen or not - they deemed an "enemy combatant," to hold them indefinitely with no due process and to torture them until they became incoherent, broken, brutalized shells of human beings, if they survived at all. They did this to the guilty and they did this to the innocent. But they also had no way of reliably knowing which was which and who was who. Never before in wartime has the precious, sacred inheritance of free people been treated with such contempt by the leaders of the democratic West.

Wall Street Journal Editorials

Both candidates penned op-ed pieces for today's WSJ.

Obama's is here.

McCain's is here.

Uh-Oh!

More cartoons here.

On Second Thought...

Zogby is indicating a widening of the polls:

Tightening?

Nate Silver tells us to keep it in perspective:

Overall, our model shows McCain closing Obama's gap in the national popular vote to about 5.4 points. His win percentage has increased to 6.3 percent, from 3.8 percent last night.

The Ubiquitous Joe the Plumber

It seems evident that the plan involving Joe the Plumber is to have him do these interviews wherein he espouses total garbage but then employs the caveat of "Well, it's just my opinion."
We saw him do this when he claimed that a vote for Obama was equal to a vote for the death of Israel (and Shep Smith had to add a flabbergasted disclaimer in which he disputed Joe), and now he's on FOX telling people that Obama's "loyalty to the country" should be questioned.
Again. It's just his opinion, right? Is he or is he not a spokesman for the McCain campaign? (HINT: The answer is, by all accounts, yes)

5-State Election

From FiveThirtyEight:

I should caution that by far the most likely scenario is that Obama wins some relatively decisive victory of anywhere from 3-12 points in the popular vote. If Obama wins the popular vote by anything in this range, he will find plenty of blue territory, accumulating somewhere between 300-400 electoral votes. The electoral math will matter very little.

We can probably assume, however, that IF the national polls tighten significantly (and to reiterate, the likelihood is that they will NOT), McCain will edge out a victory in North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, North Dakota, Montana, Georgia, and Missouri; put those states in the McCain column for the time being. Likewise, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa all appear safe for Obama, even in the case of significant tightening. Put those in the Obama column.

Bunker Mentality

From Larison:

Obama is running out of states if you follow out a traditional model. Today, he expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn’t have the votes to win. ~Rick Davis

Via Andrew

When your campaign has hung all of its hopes on the crazy gamble of flipping Pennsylvania, a state that Bush couldn’t win in his re-election campaign in relatively good times, it is strange to have your staffers talk about traditional models. According to the traditional model, McCain is already finished and has been for weeks. Then again, what else are you going to say when Arizona and Georgia are now rated as toss-up states? I’m not sure how much of this is put out for public consumption to prevent stories titled, “McCain staffers lose all hope,” and how much of it is an expression of the real views of McCain insiders. Presumably the insiders know that they’re going to lose and are keeping up appearances, but how shocked will McCain’s voters be when the comeback that they are being vaguely promised does not happen?

There does seem to be a real problem emerging here: if McCain supporters, encouraged by the talk radio echo chamber, believe that they are on the verge of an upset win and also believe in claims of widespread voter fraud, what are the odds that they are going to accept the results on Tuesday? It seems to me that Obama needs to win by a significant margin in the popular vote and Electoral College to quash “stolen election” theories.

Pollster

Pollster gives Obama a six-point lead in their national poll.

Double Digit Lead

According to all three national polls at Gallup (registered voters, and both types of "likely" voters), Obama has a double digit lead on McCain.

Khalidi

Eric Martin has a terrific post about the Khalidi-Obama story.

Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the Middle East Center at the University of Chicago for some time, and he and his family came to know the Obamas at that time. Knowing someone and agreeing with him on everything are not the same thing.

Later:

McCain is bringing up Khalidi in order to scare Jewish voters about Obama's associations, and it is an execrable piece of McCarthyism and in fact much worse than McCarthyism since it is not about ideology but rather has racial overtones. Not allowed to pal around with Arab-Americans, I guess. What other ethnic groups should we not pal around with, from McCain's point of view? Is there a list? Are some worse than others?

Undecided? Or Just Not Paying Attention?

Margaret and Helen try to break it down for an undecided voter:

Oh Cecilia, bless your heart. We have only been at this for two years, sweetheart. There were over 40 debates during the primaries and most recently we have had three Presidential debates and one Vice Presidential debate. Honey, I trust you can read. Please do because this is important.

And later:

If I hear that McCain is a Maverick one more time I just might throw myself to the floor and break a hip. A maverick is an independent individual who doesn’t go along with a group or party. If John McCain’s a maverick I am one of those cheerleaders on the sidelines of Harold’s beloved Dallas Cowboys. Nobody seems to dispute that the Republican party led by George W. Bush got us into this mess but what everybody seems to forget is that Sarah Palin and John McCain are Republicans. Look, when the Religious Right came knocking at the door of the RNC Membership Round-Up, someone should have turned out the porch lights and told everyone inside to be quiet until they went away… the same thing I do when those nice looking boys on bicycles with bibles come to my door. But the Republicans opened that door, invited them in and now they have to live with that decision.

How McCain Lost the Center

Clive Crook explains how McCain gained and lost the centrists' votes.
Quote:

Mr Obama, for all his remarkable strengths, was beatable. The fact that he is not even further ahead in the polls underlines the point. Put his race to one side: in my view, the fact that he is black is as much an advantage as a disadvantage. But he is inexperienced and his voting record is firmly to the left. Independent voters have therefore had their doubts throughout and it is independent voters who decide elections. Mr McCain was the very man to appeal to these wavering centrists. Among Republicans he was uniquely qualified because of his reputation as a pragmatist and serial deviator from the party line. Yet he failed to exploit this advantage.

The choice of Sarah Palin as running mate was pivotal. Mr McCain’s mistake was not his decision to choose a social conservative with no experience of national politics. He needed a running mate to energise his party’s activists, who would otherwise have found the prospect of a McCain presidency uninspiring. And inexperience, in itself, is not a disqualification for high political office – if it were, Mr Obama would be ruled out, too. The first response to Ms Palin was everything Mr McCain could have wished. She appealed not only to the conservative base but to many independents as well. The instant contempt many Democrats expressed at her selection hurt them, not her, and the Republican ticket moved ahead in the polls for the first and only time in the race.

Against the odds, this was a position from which Mr McCain could have won. But two things had to happen for him to capitalise on this advantage. First, Ms Palin needed to withstand scrutiny. Second, Mr McCain, with the conservative base now in his pocket, needed to exploit the opportunity this gave him to move his campaign to the centre.

A Vote for the Death of Israel Reaction

Daniel Larison responds to what he calls a "ginned-up phony controversy".

For those of you who have wisely been ignoring the final days of the campaign, here is the story about the tape: back in 2003 when Khalidi was about to leave Chicago to fill Edward Said’s post at Columbia after Said had passed on, there was a farewell party attended by Obama, and there was a video record of it that was leaked to the L.A. Times that the newspaper first reported on in April. This party and Obama’s attendance at it have been more or less common knowledge to anyone who has spent much time following Obama’s career, and the party and the relationship between Obama and Khalidi have been made out to be meaningful evidence that Obama harbors some pro-Palestinian attitudes because of things he said at this party about Khalidi. Pro-Palestinian activists and advocates for “even-handed” U.S. policy ardently hope this is the case, and hawkish “pro-Israel” people desperately fear that this is true, or at least they are willing to pretend that they think it is true if it helps to defeat Obama, whom they may dislike for various other reasons. Now some are claiming that the tape purportedly has a record of Obama saying things not just about Khalidi, but about Israel and Palestine as well, but as far as I can tell this is just more baseless rumormongering.

A Vote for Obama = A Vote for the Death of Israel?

Consider the severity of that claim. And yet, people who are admittedly ill-informed as Joe the Plumber (who apparently has become a pseudo spokesperson for the McCain campaign) is saying that a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel. And when asked to defend or, at least, try to explain why he would say such an inflammatory thing, Joe has nothing to say.
This has become totally out of control. Frighteningly out of control.
Even Fox News' Shepherd Smith has to explain that Obama has repeatedly stated that his administration would continue to support Israel completely.

Again With the Socialism!

From Hertzberg:

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.”

And later:

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

The GOP's ADD

Eric Martin discusses the GOP's inability to focus on creating one narrative version of Obama in its attacks:

But once you’ve made a narrative choice, you do have to stick with it - you can’t just keep bouncing around, or people become confused. If you are telling the story of a scary vampire, you can’t decide in chapter 2 that he’s also 500 feet tall and radioactive and bent on destroying Tokyo, in chapter 3 that he is actually a giant man-eating shark, and in chapter 4 that he is all this and a super-terrorist trying to plant a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. All of these things are, indeed, scary, but taken together they add up to a muddle.

This is the problem. It’s not just the McCain campaign’s problem - although their inability to pick a narrative and stick to it is a special kind of inexcusable - it’s a problem for the entire wingnut noise machine. Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hilter [me: Chamberlain!] Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from - wait for it! - the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties. It makes no sense. It’s a jumble sale of fears and scary associations from 50 years of wingnut witch hunts and smear campaigns, a flea market of pre-owned and antique resentments, and if one does detect a semi-consistent 1960’s motif running through it all, that’s because that’s when most of these ideas were coined.

The Palin Effect

There's no question that many conservatives have been distraught over the selection of Sarah Palin to be McCain's running mate. Talking Points Memo has a cool interactive graphic that highlights the thinking of the some of these individuals.

Election Dance Competition

Anchorage Daily News Endorses Obama

You've heard it by now. Here's the link.
Quote:

Gov. Palin has shown the country why she has been so successful in her young political career. Passionate, charismatic and indefatigable, she draws huge crowds and sows excitement in her wake. She has made it clear she's a force to be reckoned with, and you can be sure politicians and political professionals across the country have taken note. Her future, in Alaska and on the national stage, seems certain to be played out in the limelight.

Yet despite her formidable gifts, few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth. To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crisis would stretch the governor beyond her range. Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.

Top 10 Reasons Conservatives Should Vote for Obama

From Andrew Sullivan.

Obama's Birth Certificate

It seems that over the past week or so, there's been an increase in discussions (i.e., arguments) regarding the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate. Phil Berg tried to bring legal action against the Obama campaign, claiming that Obama is not a natural born citizen and, therefore, ineligible to run for POTUS. The judge dismissed the case on the grounds that Berg lacked standing to bring the case to court. There are literally hundreds of blogs and websites that claim to have the "exclusive" evidence that finally proves that the document provided by the Obama campaign is a forgery.
Now, I'm as interested in conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, so I did some reading from sources that I consider reputable.
FactCheck.org

PolitiFact

Snopes

Christopher Hitchens on Palin

In his usual understated tone...!

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Chuck Hagel: Republican in Exile

A fascinating article in the latest New Yorker about senator Chuck Hagel and his strained relationship with his party, the GOP. Of particular interest is Hagel's longtime friendship with John McCain, a man he refused to endorse for president.

McCain no doubt understood how difficult it would be for Hagel to endorse him, yet their differences were what would make the endorsement so valuable. From 2004 on, McCain, in his desire to win the nomination, had embraced Bush’s policies ever more zealously, while Hagel had become the Administration’s most severe Republican critic. Although he has frequently voted with his party on domestic policy, his views on foreign policy represent a bold departure from those of the Administration, and his willingness to take Bush to task publicly has alienated many Republicans. In some ways, Hagel is far more of a maverick than McCain has ever been, and his endorsement would likely sway independents whose votes McCain probably needs in order to win.

And:

Hagel’s unwillingness to endorse McCain is generally perceived to be a result of their ongoing disagreements over the Iraq war. But he told me that the gulf between them is much deeper: “In good conscience, I could not enthusiastically—honestly—go out and endorse him and support him when we so fundamentally disagree on the future course of our foreign policy and our role in the world.”

And finally:

For Hagel, almost as disturbing as Palin’s lack of experience is her willingness—in disparaging remarks about Joe Biden’s long Senate career, for example—to belittle the notion that experience is important. “There’s no question, she knows her market,” Hagel said. “She knows her audience, and she’s going right after them. And I’ll tell you why that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because you don’t want to define down the standards in any institution, ever, in life. You want to always strive to define standards up. If you start defining standards down—‘Well, I don’t have a big education, I don’t have experience’—yes, there’s a point to be made that not all the smartest people come out of Yale or Harvard. But to intentionally define down in some kind of wild populism, that those things don’t count in a complicated, dangerous world—that’s dangerous in itself.
“There was a political party in this country called the Know-Nothings,” he continued. “And we’re getting on the fringe of that, with these one-issue voters—pro-choice or pro-life. Important issue, I know that. But, my goodness. The world is blowing up everywhere, and I just don’t think that is a responsible way to see the world, on that one issue. And, interestingly enough, that is one issue that stopped John McCain from picking one of the people he really wanted, Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge”—the Independent senator from Connecticut and the Republican former governor of Pennsylvania. (Both men are pro-choice.)

The Oft-Made Charge of Socialism

hilzoy has some insights on the socialist charge that's still being thrown Obama's way:

If you read Barack Obama's tax plan (pdf), it seems pretty unobjectionable. He wants to cut taxes on most people, and let the tax rates on those who make over $250,000 a year go back to the levels they were at during the Clinton years, when, as we all know, the economy went to hell in a handbasket. He will keep capital gains taxes the same for people making under $250,000 a year, and raise the capital gains rate for the remaining people to 20%; again, this is where it was after Bill Clinton cut it in 1997. He would eliminate some corporate tax loopholes, but eliminate capital gains taxes for small businesses. This hardly seems like the onset of the apocalypse to me.

And later:

Look: socialism is a word that has a meaning. It means public control of the means of production. It does not mean taxing the top bracket at 39%. Likewise, "collective ownership" has a meaning, and it does not mean the situation that obtains when the government can repeal tax cuts for the top 5% of the population.

McCain Campaign on "Life Support"

FiveThirtyEight:
As a result of all of this, there is now no perceptible rebound for John McCain; in fact, the race may still be trending toward Obama, although the safer assumption is that it's flat. Meanwhile, Obama's electoral position appears as strong as ever. John McCain's chances of winning the election have dwindled to 3.7%, down from 6.5% yesterday.

McCain on Imus

John McCain was interviewed on Imus this morning and offered the normal boilerplate responses to the questions. What struck me was his defiant tone, strange laughter, inability to answer questions thoughtfully, and the assertion that Sarah Palin is the most qualified VP candidate in recent history.
More qualified than Cheney?
More qualified than Lieberman?
More qualified than Gore?
That seemed an untenable assertion on McCain's part.

You can listen to the entire interview here.

"Dead Cat Bounce"?

From FiveThirtyEight:
After some incremental improvements by John McCain over the course of the past week, we are now looking once again a handful of polls showing Barack Obama with a double-digit lead -- most dramatically his 14-point advantage in the latest Pew poll. Obama also gained ground in the aggregate of the national trackers, which showed four Obama gains (Zogby, Gallup, Pew, IBD/TIPP), one McCain gain (Battleground), and three pushes (Rasmussen, Research 2000, ABC/Post).

More On Socialism

More Steve Coll:

So we come back to the essential falsity of this moment in the 2008 campaign. The principle of progressive taxation is agreed between the two candidates. They also agree that, in principle, lower taxes can spur economic growth and innovation. They disagree about which of these two principles should be emphasized over the other at this time of economic crisis and rising income inequality. They also disagree about small fiddles on the tax-rate dial. In historical (and even economic) terms, the differences between them concerning both economic principles and specific tax-rate policies are trivial. To allow the poll-savvy advisers of the McCain camp to make this a debate about “socialism” is to capitulate to their manipulation.

Adam Smith: Socialist

Steve Coll at the New Yorker discusses Joe the Plumber and socialist charge.

(Obama, speaking to Joe the Plumber): I do believe that for folks like me who’ve worked hard but frankly also been lucky, I don’t mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress who I just met over there. . . . She can barely make the rent. . . . And I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.

The principle that Obama evinced, which most economists would regard as unexceptionable, can be traced to Adam Smith. In “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), his seminal treatise on capitalism, Smith wrote:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. . . . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. . . . It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

The Tax Cut For "95% of Working Families"

There has been a lot of clamor surrounding this piece of Obama's tax proposals. Conservatives want to know: Given that approximately 40% of Americans don't pay federal income taxes, how in the world can he cut 95% of working Americans' taxes?

hilzoy takes a stab:

Hmm. This is a tough one. How can you cut taxes for people who pay no income taxes? Magic? Welfare? Or maybe -- just maybe -- people who pay no income taxes pay some other kind of tax.

I know, I know: how could there be any sort of tax other than the (federal) income tax? I have heard that in distant lands there are strange, exotic taxes, like the "sales tax", the "property tax", "state and local income taxes", the "capital gains tax", "use taxes", "permit fees", other fees, the "severance tax", the "occupational privilege tax", the "estate tax", the "gift tax", the "federal excise tax", and even the fantastically named "generation skipping transfer tax". But surely we have no such outlandish customs here! We who live in a country that has only one sort of tax, the federal income tax, can only stare in wonder at those benighted countries where people actually pay taxes whenever they buy a shovel or realize capital gains.

ACORN Reprise

From hilzoy:

I've been following the ACORN story, and trying, bit by bit, to understand it. The broad outlines are pretty clear:

"ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve."

The Palin Millstone Around McCain's Neck

From Ken Adelman:

The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

Where is Chris Dodd?

From the NY Times:

After reports emerged in June about him having received favorable treatment on two home mortgages from the Countrywide Financial Corporation, Senator Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, promised that he would release documents to support his contention that he never benefited financially from the terms of the loans.

The senator has failed to keep his promise, and his excuses are wearing ridiculously thin.

“I think it will become obvious at the time when it’s the right time, and I’ll explain that at the time when I do so,” Mr. Dodd said last week after a speech in Norwich, Conn., according to The Hartford Courant.

When asked to elaborate, he said: “My answer is what it is, and in the right time, it will be there.”

Mr. Dodd’s original explanation for the loans were not much of an improvement, frankly. He says he knew he was on a V.I.P. list at Countrywide, once the nation’s largest mortgage lender and one of the early casualties of the financial collapse — and now the target of dozens of lawsuits over predatory lending. But he said he did not “seek or expect” preferential treatment, which has left everyone wondering what exactly the V.I.P. list was for.

Meanwhile, Mr. Dodd continues to serve as chairman of the Senate banking committee. He has been a member of the committee for much of his 28 years in the Senate. He is a leader in shaping legislation that will bail out the mortgage industry, which has given him generous campaign support over the years, particularly during his recent, unsuccessful campaign for president.

According to company e-mails unearthed and reported by Portfolio.com, Countrywide waived fees and provided mortgages at discounted rates when Mr. Dodd refinanced his homes in the District of Columbia and Connecticut. The favorable treatment could save him thousands of dollars over the course of the loans.

The Senate Ethics Committee is investigating whether the terms of the loans violated its rules on disclosing gifts. But such an investigation does not preclude Mr. Dodd from being candid.

Mr. Dodd admits he was extended “courtesies” by Countrywide. It’s time for him to extend some courtesy to his constituents and the rest of the nation and release the records on the mortgages, without delay.

Elitism and Joe Six Pack

Larison responds to Joe Carter's distinction between Joe Six Packs and Cultural Elites:

Joe Carter discusses the divide between “Joe Sixpacks” and “elites.” He made this observation, which I think does get at the heart of the problem:

Consider foreign policy. For the JSPs, the opinion of a twenty-something Army Sergeant who just got back from patrolling the streets of Baghdad carries more weight than the twenty-something Harvard grad who writes for The American Prospect or The Weekly Standard.

That’s right, which doesn’t say much for the “JSP” perspective in this case. The “elites” in this case are trying to have broader perspective and are attempting to think strategically and not tactically. That is, they are attempting to make arguments about policy. They may be good arguments, they may be terrible, but they are arguments that are necessarily more abstract and also wider in focus. The danger of abstraction is that it can lead to utopian programs or theoretical constructs that bear no relationship to the real world, which result in destructive and coercive policies (see Iraq, war in). Abstraction is unavoidable, however, if we are going to be able to think about large-scale problems in a coherent way.

Unless we’re discussing the tactical situation in Baghdad or Iraq as a whole, it’s not at all clear that the opinion of the sergeant is necessarily more useful or valid when determining what our Iraq policy ought to be. The two don’t have to be in opposition, and ought to be complementary. There’s no question that people with first-hand experience of a war zone have extensive practical knowledge and understand the way things really are, at least in the areas where they’ve been, so they have knowledge that others do not have and cannot readily acquire. There is no guarantee, however, that this perspective is a better basis for setting policy. Policymakers, journalists and pundits cannot and must not be oblivious to that first-hand experience, but that experience cannot be the only or main basis for policymaking and debate.

Vice-Presidential Responsibilities

Here is a video of Sarah Palin explaining to a third grader what, exactly, a vice-president does. The problem is, she is wrong. She claims the VP is "In charge of the US Senate."
Remember when she "jokingly" asked what a VP does on national TV? It seems she hasn't quite gotten an answer yet...

Pollster.com:


Gallup:

FiveThirtyEight:

Powell Endorses Obama For President

This Just Makes Me Sad

From the Huffington Post:

In his efforts to attack Barack Obama, John McCain appears to have turned to the same political consulting firm that was responsible for spreading vicious smears about the Senator during the 2000 South Carolina GOP primary.
Officials with King TeleServices did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Asked about the connection to King TeleServices, a receptionist for FLS relayed a message from her supervisors that implicitly acknowledged that they have been working on behalf of the Arizona Republican: "If it is having to do with the McCain campaign or the RNC, you will have to direct your question to them." According to campaign finance reports, the RNC has paid the firm more than $8 million this cycle.

Obama's Unfair Attack

There's no need for Obama to go down this path. McCain's health plan has already been scrutinized and clearly has some major deficiencies, which have been highlighted again and again (for a review, check out Bob Herbert's piece here).
Given the bad press and negative poll numbers McCain's negative attacks have been attracting, this seems an ill-timed move in absolute bad taste.
CBS:

Senator Barack Obama's newest claim (also made in a television ad) that Senator John McCain's health care plan will cut $882 billion in Medicare health care benefits for seniors, has to rank among the biggest whoppers of the whole campaign.

It's a poorly calculated estimate drawn from a suspect report, and the disputed figures in question don’t represent benefit cuts.

Colin Powell to Endorse Obama?

From the Guardian:

Former secretary of state Colin Powell is expected to use a high-profile television appearance tomorrow to end months of speculation by throwing his support behind Barack Obama.

His decision to go on television just two weeks before the election suggests he has finally made up his mind.

Powell, a four-star general who worked closely with three Republican presidents, said he would decide between Obama and John McCain, a long-time friend, after watching the presidential debates, the last of which was held on Wednesday.

His endorsement would be the biggest Obama has secured so far. As a prominent member of President George Bush's administration, he may shift some Republican-leaning voters into Obama's camp.

McCain and Obama: Comedians du Jour

Planet Money Podcast

After recommending This American Life's recent episodes regarding the financial crisis, I discovered that NPR is producing a pseudo-daily podcast called Planet Money, which explores the global economy. Here's the link. I've found it very helpful and listen to it during my commute.

Financial Update

hilzoy responds to Krugman's piece in today's NY Times:
Krugman:

Will the next administration do what's needed to deal with the economic slump? Not if Mr. McCain pulls off an upset. What we need right now is more government spending -- but when Mr. McCain was asked in one of the debates how he would deal with the economic crisis, he answered: "Well, the first thing we have to do is get spending under control."

hilzoy:

Paul Krugman doesn't need any validation from me, but: he's exactly right. I have been horrified by the number of people who have said that now would be a good time for us to cut back on government spending. This is crazy. I mean: under normal circumstances, I am a deficit hawk. (Even now, I think it's a great time to go through the budget and eliminate pointless and wasteful subsidies and programs.) But these are not normal circumstances. We are heading into a serious recession. We need to do what we can to get the economy moving again. And fiscal stimulus is exactly the way to do this.

Saying that we need to cut back on spending at this point is like saying to someone who has just been diagnosed with a treatable form of cancer, and to whom people are willing to lend money: look, you've just spent a whole lot of money on the operation to remove your tumor; you just can't afford the chemo and radiation that your doctors recommend. Time to tighten your belt! Time to retrench!

Poll Alert!

A local conservative talk show host was claiming that the Presidential election is now "within 2 percentage points" based on the latest Gallup poll. This struck me as contrary to all of the information I have been reading over the past few weeks, so I did a little digging. Luckily, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com was already on the case.

Warren Buffett: Buy American!

Warren Buffett lays his money and reputation on the line by strongly encouraging people to invest in American companies' stocks. In light of the current market volatility and uncertainty, this is like a voice in the wilderness.
Quote:

A little history here: During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.

Noonan On The Election

Peggy Noonan's op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal states some obvious truths about the GOP, Obama, Palin, and the election.
Quote:

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.

In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism.

"Spreading the Wealth"

hilzoy has a great post about the Obama/Joe-the-Plumber/McCain interaction.
Definitely worth a read.
Quote:

But that's just not what Obama said. He did not say that he wanted to spread Joe's wealth around. He certainly did not say that he thought he was entitled to simply expropriate Joe's wealth and distribute it to poor people, like Robin Hood. He said he wanted to spread the wealth: i.e., to have a tax code that is less skewed towards the wealthy. That's Obama's radical idea: progressive taxation.

Hand me my smelling salts!

ACORN Update

Also, Eric Martin has collected some funny thoughts on the focus on ACORN.

Commenter El Cid at the Poor Man Institute:

To think that the Soviets spent 70 years and trillions of dollar equivalents trying to overthrow the U.S., and all they had to do was hire some black people to go out and register voters, some of whom would seditiously give false identity information on their applications.

Stupid Soviets! Your power is no power! ACORN has real power! YOU FAIL!

Heh.

UPDATE: Giblets comes up with a unified theory:

FACT! Barack Obama was a community organizer. Acorn is made of community organisers. Acorns come from oak trees. Oak trees belong to the genus Quercus, which includes Quercus faginea, the Portuguese oak. The prime minister of Portugal is José Sócrates, whose last name looks like Socrates, who lived in Athens, which is also a city in Georgia, whose state fruit is the peach, which is native to China, which is exactly what Osama bin Laden was eating while he was plotting to destroy the Twin Towers. It's all connected, people - they just don't want you to know!

ACORN

Over the past few weeks, Republicans have primarily focused their attacks on Bill Ayers and Obama's association with a group called ACORN (for a definition of ACORN, here's Wiki, and here's the group's site). In last night's debate, McCain accused the organization of perpetrating voter fraud by allowing employees to register non-existent voters.
Here's the New Yorker's take on it:

ACORN has become the 24/7 story on Fox News, too, on account of reports that it has submitted several thousand phony registration forms to local boards of elections. These reports appear to be true. Nevertheless, the “scandal,” as Fox calls it, is itself on its face as phony as Mickey Mouse’s social security number.

During this election cycle, the Times reported today, ACORN has deployed thirteen thousand mostly paid workers, who have registered 1.3 million new voters. One or two per cent of these workers turned in sheaves of forms that they filled out themselves with fake names and bogus addresses, and, even though at least a hundred of these workers have already been fired, the forged forms have been submitted to election boards.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that groups like ACORN are required by law to submit them, even if they’re obvious fakes. This is to prevent funny business, such as trashing forms that look like they might be Republican (or Democratic, as the case may be).

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that ACORN normally sorts through forms, flags those that look fishy, and submits the fishy ones in a separate pile for the convenience of election officials.

Sounds suspicious—until you reflect that the motivation of the misbehaving registration workers is almost always to look like they’ve been doing more work than they really have, and that the victim of the “fraud” is actually the organization they’re working for.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that even if one of these fake forms results in a nonexistent person actually being registered, now under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, “any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election” must provide identification in order to actually cast a ballot. This will make it tough for Mickey Mouse, even if registered, to vote, no matter how big, round, or black his ears. Likewise, members of the Duck family (Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) who turn up at the polling place will have a hard time getting into the voting booth. (Uncle Scrooge might be able to bribe his way in, but he’s voting Republican anyway.)

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that despite all the hysteria, from 2002 to 2005, only twenty people in the entire United States of America were found guilty of voting while ineligible and only five of voting more than once.

Here's ABC News' investigative report.

And here's Fox News' account of the potential registration fraud.

Debate Reaction

A collection of responses compiled by Sullivan.

Christopher Hitchens Endorses Obama

I love reading Hitchens. There's no one else out there who can phrase things so starkly and yet elegantly. He recently wrote a column endorsing Obama for president, which, for those familiar with Hitchens' more conservative leanings, may be surprising. But in reality, his endorsement is more a repudiation of McCain/Palin than it is an actual endorsement of Obama, whom he describes as "greatly overrated". He has some pretty harsh criticisms of McCain and Palin and comes to this conclusion:

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

This American Life

If you are trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the financial crisis (and who isn't?), I would strongly recommend listening to two episodes of NPR's This American Life that explain what happened, what's happening, and what will happen in the financial world.
You can listen to them free from their website.
The first episode is called The Giant Pool of Money and is here.
The second is called Another Frightening Show About the Economy and is here.

Orwellian Indeed

From the Anchorage Daily News:

"Sarah Palin's reaction to the Legislature's Troopergate report is an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation.

She claims the report "vindicates" her. She said that the investigation found "no unlawful or unethical activity on my part."

Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian."

And later:

"You asked us to hold you accountable, Gov. Palin. Did you mean it?

Bottom line: Gov. Palin, read the report. It says you violated the ethics law."

Obama Mockumentary

I caught some of Obama & Friends: A History of Radicalism online and was appalled. While Fox acknowledged that it was an opinion piece, it was billed as investigative journalism.
Hilzoy takes Hannity and Fox to task for having Andy Martin, an anti-semite, as the main guest on the program.
And here is Sean Hannity discussing the Ayers/Obama link with Robert Gibbs, Obama's communication director. Watch as Gibbs throws the deplorable history and anti-semitic positions of Andy Martin in Hannity's face.

We Are In For An Interesting Next Four Years...

Using Terrorism as a Campaign Theme

Daniel Larison discusses the use of terrorism in politics.

So talk of Obama “palling around with terrorists” is not exactly a new attack, nor is it a function of a flailing, losing campaign.Unfortunately, this is all rather commonplace. Palin has misrepresented Obama’s views about tactics in the Afghan war in an effort to portray Obama as reflexively anti-military and, by extension, more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own soldiers. She has shown that she regards the problem of civilian casualties from allied airstrikes in Afghanistan to be unimportant, even though these airstrikes have gradually been undermining local support for the NATO mission and have prompted public apologies from no less than the Secretary of Defense. Just as they have demagogued the fear of terrorism to push for surveillance powers and invasions, many Republicans seem to treat our ongoing wars as little more than campaign props and they seem to have no qualms about demagoguing reasonable criticisms of current tactics as a way to impute disloyalty or lack of patriotism to their opponents.

Florida is Now Blue

And, as far as I can tell, McCain can't win the election without Florida.

Pollster:


Rasmussen has similar news.

That's a Very Small Red Slice of the Pie...

From FiveThirtyEight.com

For What It's Worth

The lead prosecutor in the Weather Underground trial thinks the linking of Bill Ayers and Barack Obama is untenable.
Quote:

Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.

Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.

Pitchforks and Torches Turned Back

Given the recent change in tenor at McCain/Palin events, I must say that I was very relieved to see McCain tell an audience that he respects Obama and wants to keep the campaign about issues. The video is compelling because of the audience's reaction: they boo him. But he stands his ground and argues FOR Obama against audience members' ignorant comments and questions.
I will be very eager to see where this leads. It is a stark shift for the better and I hope it continues.

Unethical

The Troopergate ethics report has been released and Sarah Palin has been found to have acted unethically in her dealings with Walter Monegan and Trooper Wooten.
Here's the article from the ADN.
And from the Journal.
And from the Times.

Rolling Stone Cover Story

I spent some time at work this morning reading the cover story about John McCain from the most recent Rolling Stone website. It attempts to set the record straight on McCain's record and the myth of his Maverick-ness. A must read.
Quote:

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

Kissinger v Ayers

Having just read The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christoper Hitchens, I was elated to see this post from Eric Martin comparing the acts of terror of William Ayers to those of Henry Kissinger.

It is incontrovertible that Obama has no formal relationship with Ayers. Ayers is not an official advisor, informal advisor, confidant or, in the parlance of the day, a pal. Contrast Ayers' non-relation to Obama with that of, say, Henry Kissinger. As Campos recounts, "Kissinger is honorary co-chair of McCain's New York campaign, and a foreign policy adviser to McCain himself."

Read the entire post here.

90.5%

Alright, I Couldn't Do It!

Here's the latest article from Newsweek about Palin.
Quote:

A key argument for Palin, in essence, is this: Washington and Wall Street are serving their own interests rather than those of the broad whole of the country, and the moment requires a vice president who will, Cincinnatus-like, help a new president come to the rescue. The problem with the argument is that Cincinnatus knew things. Palin sometimes seems an odd combination of Chauncey Gardiner from "Being There" and Marge from "Fargo."

Is this an elitist point of view? Perhaps, though it seems only reasonable and patriotic to hold candidates for high office to high standards. Elitism in this sense is not about educational or class credentials, not about where you went to school or whether you use "summer" as a verb. It is, rather, about the pursuit of excellence no matter where you started out in life. Jackson, Lincoln, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton were born to ordinary families, but they spent their lives doing extraordinary things, demonstrating an interest in, and a curiosity about, the world around them. This is much less evident in Palin's case.

This Could Legitimately Be From the Onion

Yesterday, Vice President Cheney spoke at the White House Conference on North American Wildlife Policy in Reno, NV, claiming that the Bush administration has championed wildlife preservation:

As all of you know very well, President Bush made wildlife conservation an early and a high priority of his administration. We’ve carried out that commitment in these eight years — and we’ve been proud to have people like you as partners in the enterprise.

The men and women in this room understand what conservation is all about. It means reverence toward creation, and a commitment to faithful stewardship. It means guarding our spectacular wildlife populations — not just for our own time, but for all time.

In fact, the League of Conservation Voters concludes that the Bush administration “has arguably been the most anti-environmental in our nation’s history.”

Full article here.

Health Care Plans

From publius:

One last point — remember that the argument here isn’t so much about whether markets are good or not. There is no true “Left” in America — everyone believes in markets, including yours truly. The argument, then, is over what types of markets work best in what contexts. McCain thinks health care is a context where individual markets work best. Obama doesn’t. These differences are profound — on both a practical and theoretical level.

Economists Have Feelings, Too

A while back, I posted a link to an economist's blog which outlined why a majority of professional economists prefer Obama to McCain in terms of their economic knowledge and policies.
Following on the heels of that, the latest edition of The Economist has an article that makes the same point: professional economists, by a large margin, prefer Barack Obama's economic policies to those of John McCain. This is taken from hilzoy.

From The Economist:

"A survey of academic economists by The Economist finds the majority -- at times by overwhelming margins -- believe Mr Obama has the superior economic plan, a firmer grasp of economics and will appoint better economic advisers. (...)

Eighty per cent of respondents and no fewer than 71% of those who do not cleave to either main party say Mr Obama has a better grasp of economics. Even among Republicans Mr Obama has the edge: 46% versus 23% say Mr Obama has the better grasp of the subject. "I take McCain's word on this one," comments James Harrigan at the University of Virginia, a reference to Mr McCain's infamous confession that he does not know as much about economics as he should."

(It should, however, be acknowledged that the economists self-identify as Democratic. Steven Levitt, author if Freakonomics, discusses the political leanings of economists here.)

DePalinization

Looking back through the past few days of posts, I was interested to recognize that the vast majority of them were about Sarah Palin. Now, some of that is certainly due to the fact that she is, by and large, a new figure to the national political stage and we are still learning so much about who she is. No doubt another factor is that she seems to be everywhere in the media, which, of course, is where I am getting and compiling links for Meta-Ninja.
So I think I am going to DePalinate today. No posts about Palin. I'm going to stick to the other three members of the 2 major tickets (remember them?).
(Clarification: I will avoid Palin unless, of course, there's some major event that requires me to cover her...)

Palin and Darfur

In Thursday's debate, Palin claimed to have "called for divestment" of Alaskan funds in Darfur:

When I and others in the legislature found out we had some millions of dollars in Sudan, we called for divestment through legislation of those dollars to make sure we weren't doing anything that would be seen as condoning the activities there in Darfur. That legislation hasn't passed yet but it needs to because all of us, as individuals, and as humanitarians and as elected officials should do all we can to end those atrocities in that region of the world.

ABC is reporting that, after checking the public records, Palin's administration actually blocked that legislation from being passed...

Palin De-Leashed

Released into the wild. Well, maybe not the wild. It's just Fox News. But I guess it's better than nothing...

Yesterday, she sat down in front of the Gateway Arch with a Fox News Channel reporter, the type of interview that is routine for national candidates but from which Palin had been largely shielded after she became the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

"Well, I beg to differ with the notion that I was reined in," she said. "But, if there was any of that, it's over," Palin said.

Steven Pinker Weighs In

Yes, the renowned language and cognition professor and author has written an interesting op-ed in the NYTimes on Sarah Palin's debate perfomance.
Quote:

The impression fits with the overall theme that Ms. Palin and Senator John McCain have been trying to advance: that expertise is overrated, homespun sincerity is better than sophistication, conviction is more important than analysis.

Being able to see Russia from Alaska, then, means you have an understanding of foreign policy; living in an Arctic state means that you have an understanding of climate change. In Mr. McCain’s case, it means, as he wrote last month, understanding technology policy because he flew airplanes in Vietnam and being concerned about the oceans’ health because he served in the Navy.

A Do-Over

With a little help from her friends at Fox News, Palin has some specific Supreme Court rulings and news sources to cite. She couldn't name them extemporaneously but, amazingly, was able to come up with some actual information after a few days. Gee, that's not suspicious...
Here's the quote that kicked me in the pants:

Palin offered an explanation for why, in the Couric interviews, she turned in what surely ranks as one of the worst performances ever by a public official on camera:

She was "a little bit annoyed" at Couric for not asking the right questions. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you're gonna get clobbered."

No matter what you say?? You didn't say ANYTHING, Sarah. THAT was the problem!

Troopergate Investigation Stalled

From the Anchorage Daily News:

"The Alaska Supreme Court has agreed to hear an emergency appeal from lawyers seeking to shut down the Legislature's Troopergate investigation of Gov. Sarah Palin.
The action comes the day after Anchorage Superior Court Judge Peter Michalski threw out their lawsuit attempting to halt the Legislature's investigation of what's known as Troopergate. The suit was filed on behalf of a group of Republican state legislators who oppose the investigation."

More VP Debate Reaction

Salon agrees with my conclusion: Palin exceeded expectations, but Biden won.

But there was no real standout moment headed for the already large YouTube archive of Palin pratfalls. The closest she came to really floundering was when she answered a question about when nuclear weapons should be used. "Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be all, end all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period," she said. "Our nuclear weaponry here in the U.S. is used as a deterrent. And that's a safe, stable way to use nuclear weaponry." Of course, when you sound a little unsteady talking about nuclear war, it might matter more to the average undecided voter than if you sound unsteady talking about, say, the details of the foreign aid budget. (She pronounces it, à la Bush, as "nucular," but that might just be more folksy charm.)

Questions

Okay. I decided to post the exchange rather than just provide the link. Here they are:

IFILL: Governor, on another issue, interventionism, nuclear weapons. What should be the trigger, or should there be a trigger, when nuclear weapons use is ever put into play?

PALIN: Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be all, end all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.

Our nuclear weaponry here in the U.S. is used as a deterrent. And that's a safe, stable way to use nuclear weaponry.

But for those countries -- North Korea, also, under Kim Jong Il -- we have got to make sure that we're putting the economic sanctions on these countries and that we have friends and allies supporting us in this to make sure that leaders like Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad are not allowed to acquire, to proliferate, or to use those nuclear weapons. It is that important.

And here's the one on education.

Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced 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.

Operation Coffeecup

Krugman reponds to Palin's closing quotation of Reagan in last night's debate.

When did he say this? It was on a recording he made for Operation Coffeecup — a campaign organized by the American Medical Association to block the passage of Medicare. Doctors’ wives were supposed to organize coffee klatches for patients, where they would play the Reagan recording, which declared that Medicare would lead us to totalitarianism.

I think this was in Michael Moore's film about the health care industry.

The Belated VP Debate Reaction

There is no questioning the fact that the expectations for Sarah Palin were incredibly low coming into last night's VP debate with Joe Biden. All she had to do was avoid any of mind-numbingly incoherent responses she gave to Charles Gibson or Katie Couric and she would be able to claim victory. She came out swinging and gave a pretty impressive performance for the first 30 minutes of the debate. Her answers were still, by and large, nonsensical and uninformative, but her presence was powerful. Midway through, Biden got a grip and realized that she was so dependent on her talking points that she was going to have difficulty going off-script, so to speak. This gave him a huge opening to make attacks on McCain to which she had very little to say in response. By the end, two things were clear: Palin had exceeded the paltry expectations placed on her, and Biden had won the debate. Subsequent poll results affirm that opinion.
Some highlights:
I was shocked by the incoherent and inept responses she gave to questions regarding nuclear (or "nucular" if you are W or Palin) proliferation and education. Go back and read the transcripts of her responses. They are as bad as any of her Couric responses - just given with more confidence and pep.
Biden's response to the question about Cheney was devastating. While she stumbled around trying to articulate the inherent "flexibility" that's apparently built in to the office of the vice president, Biden leveled a remarkable attack on Cheney, calling him "dangerous" and claiming that he had abused his office to the detriment of the US.

The Krauthammer Article Heard 'Round the Web

This article from conservative journalist Charles Krauthammer has been passed along vie email and networking sites for the past few days. While it's certainly no ringing endorsement of Obama, it is clearly a reality-check for the McCain campaign.

"Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a "second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."

The Price of Speaking Your Mind

Kathleen Parker, a conservative journalist, has gotten some vicious feedback from the GOP after calling for Palin's withdrawal from the campaign.

"The fierce reaction to my column has been both bracing and enlightening. After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening."

And:

"The picture is this: Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn't sound American to me, but Stalin would approve. Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different than one's own, then we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)"

Polls, Polls and More Polls

FiveThirtyEight:

Nevada looks good for Obama. New Hampshire looks really good for him -- and that was one of those states where we hadn't shown much bounce for him before. Yet another North Carolina poll shows Obama ahead; for the first time, we now have him as a (very, very slight) favorite in the state. Obama seems to be gaining a point in that Morning Call tracking poll in Pennsylvania almost every single day.

Gallup:


pollster:

The Ubiquity of Sarah Palin

She's everywhere. Except, she's also nowhere. By that I mean that she still is playing it coy with the media. Yes, she's had those disastrous interviews with Gibson and Couric, but, much to Andrew Sullivan's chagrin, still no press conference. While her debate performance seems to have satiated her conservative base for now, there is still a significant amount of concern about her abilities.
Here's an open letter to her from the American Conservative.
Quote:

Now you’re the latest object of their attention, and you’re probably finding the program a bit confusing. They tell you that the U.S. is fighting “World War IV,” a struggle against “Islamofascism.” We can win, they say, as long as we’re prepared to bomb Iran and build up the national-security establishment at home, just like Reagan did.

Trouble is, your tutors also believe we’re still engaged in “World War III,” the Cold War with Russia. So maybe the Gipper didn’t win that one after all. In fact, neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz chided Reagan for appeasing Moscow. And when terrorists struck the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, Reagan, instead of “staying the course,” withdrew our troops. Your Beltway suitors prescribe the opposite of Reagan’s strategy.