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?

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 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.

JSMIII

I've noticed some conservative blog commenters (not here; they all left when we announced that we would take every comment except for utter insane violent nonsense and impersonations of our writers) like to refer to Obama as BHO. Maybe they're just trying to avoid typing those extra two letters, but I think it's more likely this is another instance of idiots thinking it's somehow important to note that Obama's middle name is Hussein (coincidence? Or PROOF?). In addition to the usual hilarity of stupid racist rightwingery, this is also funny because McCain's full name is John Sidney McCain the Third. Can JSMIII defeat corporate greed and the Washington fatcats? Actually, yes he can.

McCain Claims He Invented Cell Phones!

Not only that, he says he personally invented Wi-Fi too.

creepy thought

If McCain wins, there could be a significant fraction of his voters who start literally praying for him to die, so that they can get the President they really want.

McCain the Fighter

terrific video:

Republican Lameness

One factual statement that no one can deny is that Republicans never do anything cool. This has been true since Taft, who followed his elephant-slaying predecessor by getting stuck in a bathtub*. As a result, every musician hates John McCain.

Most recently, the RNC played "Barracuda" by Heart, who then sent them a cease and desist letter. Of course, the RNC followed in its grand tradition of not paying attention to what a song actually means before they illegally use it, so Heart helpfully pointed out that their anthem against bland corporate misogyny had led to "irony in Republican strategists' choice to make use of it there".

In the article that I Googled so I could link to the Heart story, I also learned that the Republicans weren't even cool enough to use "Hello Dolly" back in 1964 (probably not coincidentally about the time the modern Republican party really got going). The producer who owned the rights even authorized a "Hello Lyndon" version for the DNC just to give the GOP that extra little fuck you.

What's more, I realized that in my earlier round-up of the McCain campaign's pathetic musical sadness, I neglected to mention that Jackson Browne actually sued the Republican Party for using his song "Running On Empty". It's one thing when major musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan support your opponent. And it's bad enough when Chuck Berry, whom Wonkette considers a hilariously last-choice option for McCain, doesn't like him either. And it probably hurts even more that McCain's favorite band also hates him. But when way-past-their-prime acts who faded out of the spotlight in the Keating Five era, your Mellencamps, your Hearts, your Brownes, give you the finger, that's when you know, and it must be interesting to have proof on such a deep level, that you are a historically lame person.

Bonus Great Thing: According to this letter, which I'd recommend for its interesting take on Palin, "Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah. They call her 'Sarah Barracuda' because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness." This isn't the greatest source, although it's also not the worst, but I think we can all agree that Palin definitely got her nickname not because of her stand-out point-guard skills in the Alaska women's high school basketball scene, but because she is a cruel, horrible person. Barracuda!


*Note that the last cool Republican quit the party in disgust soon thereafter. This may also be why he killed all those elephants.

one more thing about Palin

After her big speech, there's no way she gets Eagleton'd. She's a hilariously flawed candidate, but she's absolutely earned the devotion of the republican base, and McCain can't give up that benefit, even if it literally might be the Only benefit.

We forget now, but last year the Republican field of candidates was an embarassing, motley mess. John McCain won by default against a mean-spirited transvestite, a lazy actor, a weird and despicable east-coast millionaire, and a likable-but-dumb christianist who didn't hate taxes enough.


The Republicans just wanted a charismatic social conservative the whole time, and now Sarah Palin has emerged as exactly that person. She could've been the nominee this year, if her career was just a year or two older. There's no surprise that the mere mention of her name drew the biggest, most impassioned applause during McCain's speech. They genuinely prefer her, plain and simple.


The most striking moment of this convention came right after Palin's speech. The crowd had been screaming and cheering with extraordinary energy, for a solid hour, and suddenly McCain made his cameo appearance with her. All of that passion she fired up, and suddenly we remember that it's all for the cause of this shriveled, pasty peanut of a man. It really looked like Oz emerging from behind the curtain.

McCain looks like a little old man, trying to hitch himself to her star. The future of the GOP is not with him and maybe he knows it, maybe not. But he's unleashed something with this pick that he can't necessarily control.


Sarah Palin is bigger than John McCain right now, and I don't know if anything is gonna change that.

mr. familiar

McCain's speech last night was pretty good. Maybe it wasn't a brilliant speech, but he came off as really nice and genuine. It made me like McCain again, for at least a day. He's still the wrong man for the moment and his campaign is a gruesome Rovian hack machine, but the guy himself seemed nice for the first time in a while.

It looks like his goal in that speech was to be Mr. Familiar. In these dangerous times, his appeal is gonna be "You know me, I've been around." A lot of the pundits say that his speech sucked, but he looked like a guy we've known for a long time. That'll be a good gambit for winning over the middle.

Something I don't get about him is, everything in his mythology and in the journalism indicates that he's this tough guy, maverick, fighter- but he looks so fucking meek every time he gives a speech. He doesn't just look old, he looks delicate. soft.

Obama truly looks more Presidential, and the debates are gonna make a jarring visual contrast.

T-minus Nine weeks

Wow, what a crazy fucking week! The Democratic National Convention looks like a pretty major success, with more knockout, devastatingly good speeches than I can ever remember at a convention before. Michelle, Hillary, Bill, John Kerry, Teddy, Joe and Barack all delivered big moments and great commentary. The Obama speech was really stellar- a very specific and serious explanation of where he wants to take the country, plus a pretty surgical dissection of McCain's various critiques and campaign tactics. Beautiful work. And the stadium gambit feels like it paid off- instead of coming off as grandiose, it really looked like a massive gathering of regular people. Extraordinary diversity- young, old, every color, in pretty much every shot of the crowd.

The GOP Convention meanwhile is off to a rocky start. McCain picked Sarah Palin for VP, a decision that looked great for precisely One day. Since then, stories have rolled out daily about how utterly unserious and unvetted this pick really was. McCain seems to have undercut his experience argument, in addition to coming off as rash and cavalier in contrast to Obama's sober and studied VP choice.

And of course, Hurricane Gustav is issue number one. Many of our contributors grew up pretty close to Katrina and Gustav's path, so this is not something we'll take lightly. On the political front, it pretty much shut down a day of the RNC, and that's all we'll say.


The numbers are in flux, of course, and we'll really understand the state of the race in a week or two. But right now, it looks like the Dems made the most of their Convention, and we're yet to see if the Republicans can organize an equally clean, effective message.

McCain's VP

John McCain picks Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, for vice president.



Now the conversation must turn to: Who will Sarah Palin select as her running mate? Because John McCain will soon die.


Seriously, the GOP ticket is now Cheney-Bush. If Bush had ovaries.

Excited

I can barely sleep, mainly because I am so excited for tomorrow. Tonight, Barack Obama gave a devastatingly good speech, making the case for his Presidency in strong, specific terms, before a crowd of 80,000 people.

And tomorrow, little old John McCain is gonna hop around some college's barely filled auditorium and in his soft, nasal voice, declare: "My friends, meet the next Vice President of the United States: Mitt Romney!"

and a smattering of tepid applause and individually-audible cheers will kinda-surround America's least favorite millionaire and our Oldest Hero.

UPDATE: Well, damn it.

Obama: Specifically Better than McCain

One weird criticism the anti-Obama crowd often throws out there is that his supporters don’t know any of his positions on anything. Then the argument goes one of two ways: 1. If anyone looked they would see that Obama has no real positions and is just a lot of hot air. 2. If anyone looked they would see that Obama is just another regular politician whose positions are barely different from those of John McCain. Each assertion is dumb in its own unique way, because 1. Obama has better-articulated positions than McCain, is better able to explain those positions when asked, and has run on the issues instead of on relentless character assassination and a largely irrelevant 40-year old war record, and 2. Obama and McCain have more substantive policy differences than any two candidates since at least the Reagan era.

Anyway, just to have something to link to again and again when this comes up, I thought I’d run down a few of the many ways Obama’s policy soundly trumps McCain’s. For primary sources about their policy, you can easily check their campaign websites.

Foreign policy: This is pretty obvious. Put succinctly, Obama wants to focus on liberal internationalism, which is based on working within agreed-upon international policy as a way to resolve conflict, whereas McCain favors a more extreme version of the Bush doctrine that everything we don’t like is a grave, Sudetenland-esque existential threat that must be met with full-on war. Let’s divide this category so the paragraphs will look shorter:

Iraq: Specifically, Obama wants to get out of Iraq in about 16 months, whereas McCain wants to stay until we “win”, although he has never really defined what winning would look like. We will stay until we win, and if we win, we can stay longer, say 100 years. Obama’s plan is in line with what most Americans, most Iraqis, the Iraqi president, and, indeed, most people around the world want. McCain’s is not.

Other: Obama thinks it’s a good idea to meet with foreign leaders to try and avoid additional wars. By contrast, pretty much the only thing McCain has been consistent on during his senate term is war-like aggression toward everyone from North Korea to Iran to Russia. He is far more likely to get us into another war. And his expertise does not compare favorably to that of Obama, which is one reason foreigners like Barack so much. As an example of this, consider the Georgia crisis. McCain was part of the crowd that acted like it would rush to Georgia’s aid in a Russia conflict. That crowd pretty arguably helped push Georgia toward invasion. Afterwards he blustered about Russia’s plan to take over all its old states (not true) and said that we were all Georgians (also not true). The Georgian president sized all this up, decided he needed American help, and turned to... Joe Biden.

Taxes: Obama’s tax plan increases government revenues by raising taxes on the very wealthiest families while either lowering or leaving unchanged the taxes for everyone else. McCain has most recently been in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts, which require middle class families to pay a much larger proportion of the total revenue, and wealthy people to pay a much smaller portion. Obama would essentially balance the budget through matching revenues to expenditures. McCain cannot possibly balance the budget under his tax plan, and has made vague statements about cutting waste (a meaningless amount of money in context) and nonessential government programs. He hasn’t said what any of them are. He plans to continue devoting vast amounts of taxpayer money to a pointless war. Obama does not.

Economy: Difficult to compare because McCain has been pretty vague and does not have near the level of detail in his policy that Obama does. But in short, Obama favors a variety of economic stimuli to American workers combined with increased government oversight of things like the housing market, credit card companies, and other lending/investment institutions. I really can’t say what McCain favors specifically, because neither can he, but it seems to involve fewer stimuli, less oversight, and more emphasis on cutting waste, which is, in the grand scheme of things, both irrelevant and largely impossible. Of the two, he is more closely aligned with Bush’s economic policies.

Energy: Here again, it’s difficult to say what McCain favors, although this time it’s because he constantly changes his mind. For instance, he opposes his own McCain-Lieberman bill which would have helped curb greenhouse gas emissions. Obama has a coherent plan for increasing investment in green technology while instituting a cap-and-trade policy on carbon emissions, essentially providing a market incentive to stop using oil. On paper McCain also favors these things, but who the hell knows what he actually thinks. One area the candidates differ even on paper is in pandering to big oil. Obama favors a windfall tax on oil profits, which would help regular Americans deal with the increasing cost of oil without creating policies that reaffirm our dependence on it (things like gas tax holidays). McCain is against that, possibly because he has financial and political ties to big oil. Lately his policy has mostly revolved around offshore drilling and a gas tax holiday, which even he knows won’t work.

Education: Obama favors fixing No Child Left Behind, including funding it. He wants government help to improve access pre-school education and after-school programs. He also wants to increase government assistance to college-bound students and simplify federal student aide applications. McCain didn’t have an education policy on his website for most of the primaries. Today, he has one, and it is a long string of meaninglessness revolving almost entirely around the idea of competition, meaning that students should be able to leave a failing school. He doesn’t say how we achieve this or how it will actually improve anything. He has no concrete plan relating to NCLB, pre-school, after-school programs, or college in general.

Healthcare: Obama favors nationalized healthcare. McCain does not.

The assertion that Obama is the candidate of empty rhetoric is almost impressive in its commitment to absurdism. Obama’s positions usually include things like policy, numbers, and plans. McCain’s, when he has them, are typically garbled and bellicose pronouncements with tenuous connection to the world of practical politics. This election features one responsible candidate and one cynically uninformed candidate coasting on negative attacks, fearmongering, and a personal achievement from the Vietnam era. We have rarely had such a clear-cut good and bad choice, even in the Bush/Kerry election. What this discourse needs is not more details of Obama’s already vastly more coherent policy proposals. It needs a second candidate.

ads

John McCain came out with this ad today:



You know how, usually in political attack ads, the opponent will be represented with a grimacing, unflattering photo? It's just funny to me that even in McCain's attack ad, Obama is smiling and handsome. And not in a celebrity-caricature sort of way. Just in a friendly, cool way. Does he ever Not look like a good guy?

Meanwhile, Barack Obama's got this one up:



A lot of people have gotten very excited about McCain's housing gaffe, because we're actually seeing Obama and the Democrats draw blood with it. It's nice to win a cycle after a looong august slumber.

The obvious conservative complaint is, "ah look at Obama reneging on his whole 'new politics' schtick."

There's a huge conception out there among Obama critics that, fans of his are all these hippie dreamers who think Obama is this saint who's gonna politics happy and hopey. It's a big implication in the 'celebrity' line of attack, too; that us fans are emptily cheering for this pretty rock star or something.

But that's really not the case. The passion for Obama among me, and my friends and family and folks around the country, is rooted in his intellectual honesty. And rooted in the instinct that this is a serious man who is logical and responsible about how to approach the world. Sometimes logic dictates that you gotta get ugly. True in politics, too. And we're seeing that cool, rational, genuine toughness on display.



(P.S.: On the Obama-using-the-truth-to-play-hardball front, I can't wait until the debates, and we can have this conversation again.)

Breaking News: McCain VP Pick!

Here are two interested things that are unconnected. Or ARE they?

First, Gail Collins had this great line about McCain choosing Lieberman as his running mate:

“When you have a 71-year-old presidential candidate, it’s particularly important
that voters be confident that he’s backed up by an experienced and qualified
vice president prepared to step in and do the exact opposite about everything
except Iraq.”

Second, Rudy Giuliani has been back in the news lately for a dumb interview he gave in which he said, "I know from talking to John McCain about this… [that] our main criteria would be a person that would allow us to sleep at night knowing he could immediately be president." Obviously Rudy is incorrect (the main criteria is: Is this person wealthy or from Minnesota?), but there’s something else going on here: he’s making a play for the VP spot. And that would be awesome.

Think about it. McCain is clearly trying to lose this election. He is a man of honor and a patriot, and that means he would never surrender America to the likes of himself. He’s been doing everything he can to make this a one man race. He even managed to get himself branded as a negative campaigner despite his most damning insult being that Obama is quite popular.

So far we’ve all assumed that his next step was choosing Mitt Romney, the widely-reviled opportunist asshole from the gayest state in America. What better way to throw the election once and for all? Unfortunately, McCain has recently been closing in the polls as the media bumblefucks around ignoring obvious stories like him not knowing how many houses he has, wearing $500 Italian loafers, and stating that you’re not rich unless you make $5 million a year, to say nothing of his gross incompetence on the Georgia issue.

So McCain knows that he needs a nuclear option. Sure, most people hate Romney, but some just kind of don’t like him. That’s where Giuliani comes in. A cross-dressing pro-choice adulterer whose main experience consists of putting New York’s emergency response center inside the World Trade Center, he looks and talks like an evil ferret. And not only is he personally loathsome, Giuliani also highlights McCain’s greatest weakness: foreign policy. He combines aggressive ignorance of basic diplomacy with hysterical Chicken Littleism in ways that surely leave McCain awestruck. He’s the nuclear option in part because we can be reasonably sure he will nuke someone.
The McCain VP choice is much more important than Obama’s, because Americans know that they are really voting for the man who will be President when McCain dies in his third month in office. We have a right to know that that man will be Rudolph Giuliani. Only then can we be absolutely sure that our President will never be as insane as either of them.

McCain has Terrible Taste in Music

Apparently Blender magazine asked Obama and McCain to submit their ten favorite songs. The results are exactly what you'd expect. Obama picks awesome things. Springsteen, Nina Simone, Kanye. His top choice is "Ready Or Not" by the Fugees, and he has to be the first serious Presidential contender who has ever even heard of that song. Granted, he puts "Yes We Can" at number 10, but that was probably a joke.
McCain's list is so great that we are going to go through it in its entirety.

1. Dancing Queen, ABBA
Ha ha! Oh man. Well, that's seriously what he picked. Meanwhile it is unmanly for Obama to take his shirt off at the beach. When asked, "What the hell, man", McCain said (and this is true):

"I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I
impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up
again.”

What is he talking about? "Dancing Queen" came out after he got back to the U.S.. Also, I like how his phrasing indicates that he saw the missile and deliberately impacted it with his own airplane (this accurately depicts his foreign policy thinking), forever dooming him to like bands that would make music in the next few years.

2. Blue Bayou Roy Orbison
This is a pretty good song.

3. Take a Chance On Me ABBA
Can you imagine if Obama picked two ABBA songs? Jesus. I like the desperation of the title, though.

4. If We MakeIt Through December Merle Haggard
This is also a good song, although it's about scraping through trying times on desperate optimism alone.

5. As Time Goes By Dooley Wilson
This is from Casablanca, which is younger than McCain.

6. Good Vibrations The Beach Boys
This is also a good song.

7. What A Wonderful World Louis Armstrong
This is a good song, although it is probably the lamest thing you could pick if you were obviously trying to pander and go with a black jazz musician.

8. I've Got You Under My Skin Frank Sinatra
Not as good as Obama's Sinatra pick, "You'd Be So Easy to Love", although the titles accurately reflect the sensation of supporting each candidate.

9. Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond
This is one of the most annoying, horrible songs ever recorded.

10. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes The Platters
Dave Barry used to mock this as a hilariously lame song that old people request at parties, and Dave is a fairly old guy.

Four good songs, one of which is thematically inappropriate (the Haggard) and none of which are impressive choices. McCain is a terrible decision maker even when it comes to his own personal taste.