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.