T-minus One week

Goodness gracious. Just one week left. All indications are that Barack Obama is gonna walk away with this thing. McCain's campaign is in this kinda sad, post-climactic flailing state. Tiny issues, big grudges, no legitimate message.

This little story out today felt like a nice picture of the campaign. In the cold rain, one man is still ready to stand up and rally his supporters, the other is thinking, 'what's the point?' Or maybe he's thinking William Henry Harrison.

Anyway, it's just about wrapped up. And all the news in the world doesn't matter unless things get tighter in Pennsylvania, Virginia or Colorado. Obama wins with VA and CO in his column, unless McCain pulls off a miracle in PA. (hint: don't cancel your rallies!)

Bush vs. Worst: Part VII

This is the sixth installment in our series comparing George W. Bush to the worst U.S. Presidents of all human history. This week, the fifth-worst: Franklin Pierce, the man who became responsible for the second-greatest Presidential quote of all time, when, upon leaving the White House, he said, “There’s nothing left to do but get drunk.”

The only President who ever sought reelection but got turned down by his own party, Pierce’s life is so pathetic that he almost deserves sympathy even in the face of his utter failure as a man. Consider the first four months of the year he took office: In January, his family was in a train wreck. He and his wife survived, but watched as their 11-year-old son was crushed to death (their two other kids died in 1836 and 1843). In March, Abigail Fillmore, the previous first lady, died, and in April, Pierce’s Vice President, William R. King completed the ruthless march of despair by dying of tuberculosis. Pierce never bothered to appoint another VP, pretty much summing up his legacy as a leader.

Foreign Policy: In Pierce’s era the U.S. didn’t really have much foreign policy, so his imperialism, though deplorable, didn’t result in much. Nonetheless, he still managed to have a hand in the Ostend Manifesto, which said that we would buy Cuba for $100 million, or, if that didn’t take with the Spanish, we’d probably have the right to take it over by force. The memo was supposed to be a secret but it leaked and was considered embarrassingly imperialist even though this was the mid-19^th century. Pierce manages to have a notably bad Cuba-policy for a U.S. President, which is also pretty impressive.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? The Iraq invasion alone is enough. Let’s just mention his botching of negotiations with Iran and North Korea to make this incontrovertible. For what it’s worth, his Cuba policy also sucks.

Domestic Policy: There are two main parts. First, Pierce worked closely with Jefferson Davis and Lincoln-opponent Stephen Douglas to replace the relatively-OK Compromise of 1850 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Basically it said those two territories could be states and the people would vote on whether they had slavery. Then people called the Border Ruffians snuck into Kansas from Missouri, terrorized voters and cast fraudulent votes. Pierce immediately recognized their government and openly detested the Free-Staters. Eventually this all led to Bleeding Kansas, open violent rebellion in an American State that left 56 dead.
Second, Pierce had a hand in the Gadsden Purchase, a $10 million deal with Mexico that bought us the southern parts of New Mexico and Arizona. Wikipedia calls this “the greatest success of the Pierce Presidency”. It is named for James Gadsden, a rabid pro-slavery asshole who called for South Carolina to secede in 1850. Many Mexican historians consider this deal the basis of Mexico-U.S. tension that still exists today. Otherwise, Pierce generically helped the country spiral into civil war.
DBDSW? I’d say it’s neck-and-neck, which is pathetic for Bush, since Pierce’s stuff led to the Civil War. But Bush has done a greater number of things (spying on U.S. citizens, the Patriot Act, Katrina, ruining the environment, etc.), and this economic catastrophe might put him over the top.

Civil Rights: Pierce was a staunch advocate of slavery. He was bad on civil rights even in the context of an era when owning humans was legal.
DBDSW? No.

Corruption: Pierce’s administration doesn’t seem to have had any scandals that stood the test of time.
DBDSW? The Justice Department thing alone is among the most deplorable Presidential scandals in history.

Value of Replacement Player: I don’t think anyone has beaten Bush in this category yet. Clinton was clearly a better President than Millard Fillmore, and Bush still arguably brought us lower than Pierce did.

Verdict: Pierce is definitely one of the ten worst Presidents, but Bush beats him so easily, and the Hoover and especially Tyler battles were so much worse than I expected, that I’ve decided to adjust the list a little: We’ll just switch Tyler and Pierce. So now it looks like this:
10. John Adams
9. Ronald Reagan
8. Franklin Pierce
7. Herbert Hoover
6. John Tyler
5. George W. Bush

Bonus Fun Fact: Harriet Beecher Stowe was none too happy about Pierce’s blatant pro-Southern leanings in the Civil War. She called him the arch-traitor. Her brother, famed abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, sent rifles to Kansas so Free-Staters could kill Border Ruffians. They were popularly known as Beecher’s Bibles.

seen on the streets

A stern, middle aged Christian Fundamentalist holding a huge sign over his shoulder: "THOSE WHO LOVE THEIR LIFE SHALL LOSE IT"

Mere feet behind him, a gangly man dressed as a cockroach, with a huge sign over his shoulder: "CHECK OUT THE HALLOWEEN STORE ON 8th & 42nd!"

Is McCain about to endorse Obama?

As evidenced in this clip, JSMIII is finding more and more common ground with Obama's surrogates. Could an endorsement come soon?

T-minus Two weeks

Obama looks good. Complacency is probably the biggest threat to a Democratic victory. Key blocs in the Obama coalition- minorities and young'ns- have failed to show up to vote in big numbers before. But that's probably no more or less dangerous than the equal and opposite reaction- lots of republican voters, discouraged by an inevitable loss, might not go to the polls either.

The movement that has surprised me most is Virginia's hardening into a strong Obama state. Obviously there's no guarantee that this holds up, but it definitely looks very good. Virginia in and of itself could settle this election; all the firmest Kerry states, plus Virginia, is enough to move Obama past 270. In the last day or two McCain has started to zero in on Pennsylvania as a pickup opportunity, but so far the polls aren't receptive. If PA and VA both report for Obama early on Election Night, that's game-set-match.

Bush vs. Worst: Part V

After a long hiatus, I will hopefully be returning to frequent posting again, and what better way to start than with our most tendentious feature: comparing Bush to America’s most grotesque Presidential failures. Just in case we have retained a reader, and that reader has forgotten, here’s the list so far:

10. John Adams

9. Ronald Reagan

8. John Tyler

7. George W. Bush

Can Bush keep chuggin’ on down the list? This week’s challenger: Herbert Hoover!

It’s kind of sad that Hoover was such a godawful President, because he was a pretty good guy. He made his name in World War I getting food to victims. When accused of aiding Bolshevism through food-relief, he said, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!", which is awesome. But man, the Great Depression. He royally screwed the pooch on that one. So we’ll add an economy category to this one.

Domestic: Some good. He added 3 million acres to national parks, proposed creating the Dept. of Education, and got Hoover Dam going. He doubled the number of veteran hospitals, although he’s net bad for veterans’ affairs because of the Bonus Army thing, where a bunch of WWI vets asked for their money, so Hoover sent the U.S. Army to attack its own veterans, first with a cavalry charge, then with a fucking bayonet charge. Patton was in charge of the tanks, because evidently they used tanks. To be fair, Hoover didn’t expect MacArthur to send bayonets after impoverished veterans—no one knew that guy was insane yet.*

Did Bush Do Something Worse? I don’t think any one thing is comparable to attacking the army with the army. But Hoover did have some good moves, and MacArthur really was a terrifying lunatic, and Bush has had many more terrible moves (worse education policy, Katrina, domestic wiretapping, etc.). To the extent you can separate this stuff from the economy (not much), Bush is pretty significantly worse.

Economy: Hoo boy. Wikipedia says his stance on the economy was “largely based on volunteerism”, which is exactly as brilliant as it sounds. He essentially took a Buchanan approach to economic disaster, sitting around while the whole world spiraled into a hellish maelstrom of failure. He avoided legislative solutions for years; the major legislation he signed was the Smoot-Hawley tariff, widely considered a primary catalyst for deepening depressions worldwide. Guys like Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke think that his contractionary monetary policy was the biggest problem, and guys like Keynes think it was his refusal to spend government money, but they all agree: he ruined everything. Of course, he inherited a lot of his problems, but he had been an extremely powerful Commerce Secretary for most of the 1920’s, so he largely inherited them from himself. Oh sure, he tried things like the National Credit Corporation, which could have saved banks, but it was based on volunteerism (i.e. the opposite of capitalism), so it failed horribly. Unemployment hit 24.9%, a preposterous number.

DBDSW?: No. Of course, when I started this series, I thought it would be Bush’s basket of failures against Hoover’s one big gun, but then I took a few weeks off and Bush came back with a competing economic tailspin. It’s hard to say how much worse our economy will get, but it’s very likely the worst since Hoover, and Bush is quite blameworthy (lax regulations plus corruption plus generally not knowing anything about the economy equals oh shit). So although Hoover easily wins this category, it’s not nearly by the margin I would have thought at this time in August.

Foreign Policy: It seems good: Solid foreign relations, more or less ending the Roosevelt corollary, asking for the “Hoover Moratorium” so Germany wouldn’t have to keep starving by paying France make-believe money. But then you remember that he oversaw the collapse of the world financial system, which among other things, led to the rise of the Nazis and set the stage for WWII.

DBDSW? Well, he’s trying. Iceland might be finished with its little independence experiment, for example. But he’s less to blame than Hoover on the economic side. On the other hand, the Iraq War, the squandering of U.S. goodwill abroad, the failure to win in Afghanistan, the blundering attempts to provoke China, Russia and Iran into power struggles, and the many war crimes represent a much more proactively terrible policy. Hoover was wrong, but he simply did not actively, maliciously create problems like Bush has. Call it a tie.

Civil Rights: Hoover was pretty solid for his time on Native American rights. He was not much worse than average for his time on black rights, which is to say, he ignored them completely as people were lynched everywhere. The Depression was not kind to minorities. He also supported the Mexican Repatriation, which sent over 500,000 people of Mexican descent back to Mexico, even though many (a majority by most counts I’m seeing) were U.S. citizens.

DBDSW? I’d say Bush is worse compared to his contemporaries, but Hoover’s contemporaries were such assholes that Hoover wins this one. It’s not the salient category this time, though.

Corruption: Hoover was not especially corrupt.

DBDSW? Ha ha! Ah, yes.

Value of Replacement Player: This category is turning out to be a real bummer for Bush. Say what you will about Clinton, there’s no doubt America did well under him. Hoover followed Coolidge and Harding, two of our worst Presidents. Bush has the misfortune (kind of) to follow one of our few non-dismal-failure Presidents, so instead of handling a terrible situation very poorly, like Hoover, he took a good situation, turned it into a terrible situation, and then handled it very poorly. Bush wins this one in a landslide.

Verdict: We’re getting into the tough entries here. The Great Depression is far worse than anything Bush has done, but he’s doing his damndest to catch up on economics alone, and by God if he isn’t making an impressive show of it. Even if the economy recovers, it’s clear that Bush was a remarkably terrible steward of it, and I think that when you add in his despicable cowardly militarism (Hoover was maybe the least war-criminal of any of our Presidents), immense corruption, and squandering of the Clinton successes, he still takes the prize.

*Bonus Fun Fact: FDR had to deal with the same pissed off WWI vets, so he sent Eleanor to smooth-talk them over some coffee. Somehow she convinced them they really wanted to volunteer to labor on the federal highway system in Florida, where 258 of them died in a hurricane.

Links to come later.

amazing anagrams: famous works

Declaration of Indepence.... "No finer deed, an ideal concept."

Patriot Act.... "Crap to a tit."

John McCain prepares for the final debate

Fucking perfect. Via TPM.

amazing anagrams

I was playing around with this anagram generator, typing in random names and getting pretty random word combinations in result.

But the outcome for "McCain and Palin for America" is astonishingly good...

"An impaired, farcical con man."




"Obama and Biden for America" is also hilarious, and fits the conservative caricature of liberals pretty well

"Abracadabra! Feminine doom."





...and here are some other fun discoveries.

Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama = Anarchism or lovably antiblack?

the George W. Bush Presidency = See! Power hungry, big chested.

the plain facts of the electoral map

The classic minimalist Obama victory plan: Kerry states + Iowa and New Mexico + Colorado.
The classic minimalist McCain victory plan: Bush states - Iowa and New Mexico, keeping Colorado.

That's the minimum success map for each guy. But then you also have the Offense options, the pickoff opportunities, where each guy is trying to expand the map.

Obama plays offense: Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Nevada, and (the more-secure, longer-shots) Florida, Missouri, Indiana.

McCain plays offense: Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire.

Right now, McCain's pickoff opportunities have vanished completely. PA and MI are, by enormous margins, essentially in the tank for Obama. NH still might vary, although it's looking good for Obama now, but it's not a singular game-changer in the electoral vote count.

And on the other hand, Obama's map is Exploding- everywhere he wanted to challenge McCain, Obama is winning. Everywhere.

And the takeaway point is, Obama's lead is not only huge- it is also phenomenally superfluous.

The states where Obama earns a 95% or better chance of victory- the bluest, solidest Democratic states- currently add up to 260 electoral votes. He can seriously just win One, any one of the random swing states on the map, and he'll be the next President.

We could be in a position on election night, where Indiana- with its 11 electoral votes and early poll closing- might report an Obama win around 8 or 9 pm. And it'll be over before it even begins. Bust out the drinks and party the rest of the night.

T-minus Three weeks

So we're three weeks away. The story of the past few weeks is, Obama absolutely running away with this thing. The drama is simply not quite there anymore, there's this palpable sense that we're counting down to a coronation. Anything can happen, of course, but the huge majority of those any things lead to Obama victory.

The media narrative is all about what JSMIII has to do to get back in this thing, all about his campaign's awkward struggles, and the fact that one candidate is calmly and consistently talking issues while the other is frantically lobbing around little character bombs.

But let's just look at the plain facts of the electoral map.

T-minus Four weeks

Wow, only four weeks left? Crazy.

Don't have much time to write about the map, but Obama's basically pulling away. America's paying attention and they see one candidate who's pretty calm and talking about the issues, and one guy who's increasingly reduced to crazy character attacks. A week or so ago I was arguing that the national polls were deceptive, but now the state polls have all dramatically caught up with Obama's lead. Safe to say that this thing is pretty close to done.

gotcha journalism

Why, in the history of the world, does the inception of such a radical new ethos in journalism correspond with the arrival of an infuriatingly stupid gimmick of a politician? And why does it only ever target her ever and no one else ever?

I'm guessing sexism.

Probably Seen 'Em

But if not:

Holy Shit This Election is Important

Look here for voter registration deadlines by state! Some are today! Send in right now for your absentee ballot or register in NYC! Quell my apocalyptic dreams of McCain getting elected!

Wall Street vs. Main Street

As you may know, America can’t afford to keep bailing out Wall St. without also helping Main St. Obama has said it, McCain has probably screamed it to himself, and Sarah Palin accidentally said the opposite without even noticing. Even Yglesias talked about this after I wrote this post but before I put it up. Does this lame-ass metaphor actually resonate with Americans?

According to the Census Bureau, maybe not. “Main” is only the seventh most popular street name. The most popular is “Second Street”. Even “Park” is a more popular name than “Main”, meaning that, technically, we should be bailing out Second St. first and Park Ave. before Main St.

That seems about right to me. As a kid the closest Main St. to me was in a crappy little antique-store district called Old Town Spring. It’s .3 miles long, no one lives near it and I thought it was called Spring Cypress Rd. until twenty minutes ago when I looked it up. The nearest real Main St. was in Houston, and I mainly associate it with sad people going clubbing and half-assed public transportation that kept plowing into cars after it was built.

The whole Main St. trope strikes me as another one of those fictional Americana things that Republicans invent to make people nostalgic for stuff that, in reality, sucks. Another good example is small towns. People like the guy who wrote Sarah Palin’s convention speech like to pretend that small towns exemplify American values. Take a drive down Second St. in a typical small town, and that thought will horrify you. Are American values really encapsulated by a Dairy Queen, a condemned bank, and a gas station? Small towns are small because no one wants to live in them. Over there is the first Google image result that comes up for a small town where my siblings recently bought gas. It’s called Monahans, TX, and humans do not want to be there. You’ve never heard of it because it’s not important. My sister, not exactly a big-city elitist, forgot the name as soon as they left. “That sad, sad little town,” she called it.

Anyway, the point is that instead of bailing out Main St., we should be bailing out 155th St.

T-minus Five weeks

So, Obama's kicking ass. When you hold your ground with 'the expert' in a foreign policy debate, display steadiness and calm in the face of crisis, and generally see the entire country intensely focused on issues where you have a trust gap, kicking ass is what'll happen.

We'll see next week if this pace keeps up.