this is the moment

Barack Obama, floor: Jimmy Carter. Meek failure in the face of enormous challenges.

Barack Obama, probable outcome: Dwight Eisenhower. Stable, careful leadership; the boats unrocked, but life in America gets generally better.

Barack Obama, ceiling: Ten years from now, historians will no longer, as a broad, nonpartisan consensus, acknowledge Three best Presidents (Lincoln, Washington, FDR). They will acknowledge Four.




Four years ago, I knew Kerry would lose, and I was disappointed in a cynical, kinda apathetic way. I mainly felt relieved just to be in New York, which really felt like the last, lonely refuge for the things that I believe in. One of the exhilirating sensations that took over last night, running through the cheering crowds all over the city last night:

America shares my values again.

We said No to torture. We said No to senseless war. No to arbitrary, vicious hate and paranoia. We said Yes to science, and Yes to culture, and Yes to diplomacy, and Yes to intelligent leadership. Yes to respecting one another, Yes to seeing what we can do For other people, instead of just Against them. Yes to talking to the world. Yes to dignity, Yes to a campaign that treated us like adults and made an honest case for itself. Yes to eachother.

We said Yes to Barack Obama.


And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's all about the beans.

Dispatches from the Pennsylvania Ground Game

I'm in a Cosi in Philadelphia, lounging through my extra post-daylight-savings hour, before I head out to an Obama field office.

This is my third trip to Pennsylvania over the past month. Around October 4 I spent a day trip in the suburb of Jenkintown; a week later I spent a saturday in Lower Merion. This time, from yesterday until mid-Tuesday, I'm gonna be in Philadelphia proper.

The general media narrative is, this election is fought mostly on red-state territory, but McCain might have a shot in Pennsylvania. But everything I've seen has looked pretty good for Obama.

A few anecdotes, personal and political:

• There's a very impressive, seamless share-of-power dynamic between Obama's paid operation and the old-school local political networks. When I canvassed in Jenkintown, I first received training at the Obama office, and from there they dispatched me, and other volunteers, to a local organizer's home. The trust they had in eachother was very impressive.

The organizer was a wonderful, wealthy old woman who knew everybody in her neighborhood. Her husband was an NFL player in the '50s, and she exuded this quiet vibe of veteran influence- she was a particular person that every Democratic campaign wants on their side.

She had photos in her home with the Governor of PA, various mayors, and a very proudly displayed photo of herself with Hillary Clinton. She really loved Hillary, and was deeply disappointed by her loss, but ultimately decided that she needed to work for Obama, for the good of the party. And she was working- organizing and making calls and leading our neighborhood canvass. I tremendously admire the Hillary Democrats who are working hard for Obama. I know I couldn't do it if the situation was reversed, so the people who can actually put it behind them, and not just vote, but devote their time- that's really incredible.

• Jenkintown was mostly Democratic, but the undecideds were delightfully varied. 3 houses in a row I got undecideds of every stripe- high information ("I've read Obama's policy papers, and I'm not convinced"), generic ("Uh, I guess I'll vote for whoever's better on the economy and taxes") and cynical ("I dunno… they're both politicians")

• In Lower Merion, in a crucial Philadelphia suburb- the very place where these elections are won and lost- the Obama office was absolutely bustling. A large office filled with dozens and dozens of people, including about two-busloads worth of NYC volunteers. I passed the small McCain office twice that day. When I left to canvass in the morning, it was closed, with a "back in ten minutes!" sign on the door. When I came back, hours later, it was untouched. "Back in ten minutes!"

• I'm spending this last weekend in a poor, black neighborhood in Philadelphia. In earlier weekends we were trying to persuade voters; for the final push we're focusing on getting all of our ID'd supporters to the polls. Every person I talked to was voting for Obama (except one undecided). And they all knew where their polling place was.

• a 13 year old girl ran up to me while I was canvassing yesterday. "How old are you? My cousin thinks you're adorable," she said. The whole neighborhood was so animated- lots of kids on their bikes, lots of guys out just chatting and having a good time, a few old women relaxing on their porches.

• After about 8 pm we left that office and headed to a downtown Philly office, closer to where I'm spending the night. I left at 11 pm and there were still people working- preparing some yard signs, calling the west coast. There's a spirit of fun and purpose all over this campaign. It's pretty exhilirating.



And now it's time to grab a taxi and head back to the office. More notes will come tonight or tomorrow

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?

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.

Conservative Media Bias

As a group, conservatives spend a lot of time whining about how the media have a liberal bias. Normally smart people not in the media handle this the way they handle similarly valid issues like creationism and the War on Christmas: they completely ignore it. But, as anyone paying attention can see, the media actually have a systemic conservative bias, especially when it comes to Presidential elections. Since Palin is now doing so well in the polls, it's time to examine some reasons why the media hate America almost as much as her husband.

Media that doesn't even pretend: For some reason, conservatives don't produce many literate people, so print offenders like The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal op-ed page are balanced by good publications. But conservatives are good at loud fury with no attention to fact, so your Limbaughs and Hannitys and O'Reillys have huge ratings with virtually no liberal competition. Air America and Rachel Maddow just don't compete. That in itself tends to pull the national discourse rightward- millions of people watch Hannity lie every night, whereas liberals aren't even allowed to have TV shows.

Effort to balance an unbalanced discourse: In an attempt to avoid liberal bias, the media often sacrifice accuracy in exchange for balance. The problem is, we don't always have balanced arguments. Almost any policy area in this election is a good example, but let's take the failing economy. Obama has a multi-tiered, very specific plan, and he's had it for months. McCain has barely articulated anything, admits he knows nothing about economics, has a history of corruption, and for the moment has directed his rambling to "forming a committee" and attacking "greed". These are not leftist opinions; they are demonstrable facts. An accurate story about their economic plans would note that, whatever its flaws, Obama at least has a plan, whereas McCain has nothing but a history of failure and a scheme to attack a form of human desire. But the media wants to seem balanced, since, after all, many people believe very strongly in this incorrect information (maybe they wouldn't if it got reported as incorrect information). So they report the economic plans as a serious debate instead of as a plan vs. irresponsible bullshit.

Dishonesty from the right: If you wrote a movie in which the evil old white candidate and his crazy media-whore running mate told as many lies as those two people do in real life, everyone would say you were a terrible, ludicrous failure as a satirist. The right lies frequently, about pretty much anything they want. Because of the balance issue, the media are reluctant to call out these lies. Even the New York Times, more accurate than most, calls them distortions. You you could have impeccable journalistic integrity and still run a headline like, "McCain Repeatedly Lies About Obama's Record". In fact, you'd have more journalistic integrity than most. But the balance issue keeps those headlines from appearing, and the right has disproportionately exploited that. The most successful democrat (or President) of the last three decades, Clinton, got as far as he did largely because he was equally willing to be similarly shamelessly manipulative. Worse, even when the media chooses to discredit a lie, they still air it repeatedly, so a headline like "Obama: Does He Favor Sex-Ed for Pre-Schoolers?" appears over and over without the corresponding labeling of McCain as a terrible asshole. Integrity is actually a detriment in terms of winning the news cycle.

Good ideas are harder to explain than talking points: Any idiot can say "We must have victory in Iraq", and that's an easy thing to put in a story. Even if your counter is obviously correct, like "You have no idea what 'victory in Iraq' even means, do you Senator?" it still probably takes longer to parse, because it's probably a serious thought rather than a stupid talking point. "Thanks but no thanks" is easier to repeat than, "Palin fought for the bridge to nowhere, gave up as soon as the going got tough, and kept the money anyway to build a gravel road". Obama is good at slogans, but his commitment to actual policy makes it harder to communicate his plans.

Most actual members of the media, except for a few very-well-compensated assholes, are not actually partisan hacks. Nonetheless, when one party has legitimate governance as a top priority and the other is committed only to cynical electioneering, the systemic biases are difficult to overcome. Until the mainstream media ignores disingenuous cries for balance and focuses on truly objective reporting, fear-mongering and cynical lies will remain the easiest way to win an election, and candidates who respect the electorate will keep losing to fundamentally dishonorable people like John McCain.

John McCain is Terrible

Ha ha, awesome

7 Obama Advantages

The experts aren't quite sure what to make of the polling insanity caused by all the weirdness of the past two weeks, what with the popular incompetent secessionist pit bulls, the pansy hurricanes, and the first good speech by John Kerry since the Vietnam era. But whatever the result, I think it's worth taking a look at a few factors that should work in Obama's favor (many of which I am summarizing from 538). None of these is likely to be game-changing, but together they could help out in a close race.

1. Cell-phone users are underrepresented in the polls. Since pollsters get their information from phone calls, and they don't really have a way to call cell phones, people who don't have land lines are left out of the polls. These people tend to be younger, which means they're more likely to vote Obama.
   
2. Young voters may be underrepresented in the polls. Some pollsters try to weight responses by historical voter turn-outs. Since old people go around voting on everything, and young people are busy setting themselves on fire with their iPods, the youths typically get weighted pretty poorly. But Obama is not only the best candidate in several decades, he's also the coolest, so a larger-than-expected youth vote could give him a little extra boost.
3. The Presidential debates are still coming. Obama has way better stage presence than McCain. He's more charming, he's better looking, he appears healthy instead of in rigor mortis, and he's a far better speaker. And that stuff pales in comparison to the superiority of his grasp on policy. While McCain rambles on about nonexistent borders in a country he wants to occupy for 100 years, Obama knows what the fuck he's talking about. (Here's a good example). Anything could happen, but the best case scenario for the Republicans is basically staying afloat, whereas the Dems have potential for a crushing victory.
4. The VP debates are still coming. You never know when Biden will do something stupid, like calling Palin a dumb broad or something, but this guy owned Rudy Giuliani, one of the creepiest people in America. Palin is an inexperienced wad of corruption whose only substantive national appearance so far involved reading a speech written before she was even chosen. Anything could happen, and Republican damage control (widespread lying) is formidable, but I wouldn't be surprised if she looks like the incompetent local politician she is.
   
5. Enthusiasm gap. The Palin pick may degrade this a little, assuming none of her many, many scandals errupts into a big deal, but generally Dems are way more enthusiastic than GORBs this year. Anecdotal evidence from some folks I know suggests that quite a few conservatives are just too discouraged to vote.
6. Ground Game Gap. Obama has way more people on the ground than McCain. This kind of thing can make a bigger difference as the election draws nearer, since it enables you to focus your resources more efficiently.
7. Death. While new eighteenth birthdays swell Obama's ranks every day, McCain supporters are quietly dying in their sleep, mercifully avoiding the irony of voting for policies that would ruin their fading lives.

Even if the polling comes out tied or with a slight McCain advantage (and by the time the convention bounces wear off, it may show a slight Obama lead anyway), I think the good guys still have reason to be optimistic.

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.

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.

They Should Do This

After Obama's big speech, the DNC should have a surprise appearance from Bob Dylan. For many reasons, but, most important, because Obama is speaking on the 45th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech, and Dylan opened for Martin Luther King, Jr. that day. He could play "When the Ship Comes In" just like he did then, and then he could note that he was there, 45 years ago, already well known, playing in front of Martin Luther King, Jr., and he is still younger than John McCain.

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.)

Veepwatch: Playing to Win vs. Playing Not to Lose

So Obama is probably going to announce his Vice Presidential choice tomorrow morning. Right now, the conventional wisdom sees a two-man race between Senators Evan Bayh (IN) and Joe Biden (DE). Of course, this is a Very closely guarded secret, and it's entirely possible that the Bayh-Biden choice is pure media speculation.

But if it really is Biden or Bayh, it looks like a classic case of the old sports cliche, Playing to Win vs. Playing Not to Lose.

Right now the Obama campaign looks a little too plastic, a little too gentle. The VP choice Obama faces is not a matter of 'youth vs. experience' or what swing state he wants to put on the ticket. It's whether he wants to add some prickliness to his campaign, or if he's gonna reinforce that timid, plasticky image.

Evan Bayh: Playing Not to Lose

Bayh is the most-vanilla possible choice. On the surface he's a good guy, and you can check off a lot of good boxes with Bayh: young And experienced, respected in a flippable red state, a clinton supporter (unity!), not likely to make any gaffes.

Bayh's downside, though, cuts at the very heart of Obama's appeal to the left. For people like me, the most crucial difference between Clinton and Obama was that Obama seemed genuinely interested, and unashamed, of bringing progressivism back to the mainstream Democratic party. Bayh, early supporter of Iraq, former chairman of the DLC (saving the democratic party by pretending we're republicans), does not represent the new direction I'm hoping for.

So yeah, Bayh is a good, generic guy. But that's really all we're looking at. Utterly inoffensive blandness, at no cost and no benefit to Obama, except for dissapointing some progressives.

Joe Biden: Playing to Win

Biden looks like the higher risk, higher reward pick. He's an old guy, and kindof a dick. He's got his share of downsides- a little gaffe-prone, maybe affiliated with the 'Washington establishment' too much.

But what Biden brings to the table, and what Obama's really lost this month: Biden is cocky. He's aggressive. He's not gonna be sweet and timid and ashamed to stand up against GOP bullying. And he really seems to savor the fight, he Enjoys being the type of salty surrogate this campaign needs. He might say something a little stupid in the next few months, but he's also likely to land some killer rhetorical blows against McCain.

So ultimately it looks like Obama's choice comes down to, what sort of surrogate does he want: a bland and painless, generic pol; or a fellow who's gonna give you one or two embarassments, and three months of crackling, quotable hardball.


There are two great flaws with the Democratic Party of the past eight years: the concept that in order to win, we need to sacrifice liberalism and act like conservatives; and the complete and utter lack-of-balls when it comes to resisting the GOP attack machine.

I've always believed that Obama is the guy who will correct those two flaws. Biden helps Obama correct the latter… but Bayh just makes the former flaw worse.


I'm expecting Obama to go with Bayh, at this stage… or hopefully a good smart dark horse. But if it really does come down to Biden-Bayh, Obama ought to pick the guy who is ready to fight on day one.

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.

United for Morgan Freeman for Obama

While writing the post below I realized that we really need Morgan Freeman to narrate some Barack Obama ads. Then before I got around to posting this the comments veered toward Freeman too. But I think we can all agree that, as Taylor says, Freeman is a sonic messiah, and Obama should really do this.

It probably works best with positive ads. If you saw, say, slow-motion shots of Americans standing proud and smiling in front of some picturesque America places and heard Morgan Freeman say something like, “By the people. Of the people. For the people. This is America,” and right when he says that last part you see Obama smiling as he talks to schoolchildren, and then maybe Freeman says some sort of Obama slogan as they show the logo, like “Yes, we can,” you would feel so patriotic that it would make the Morning in America campaign look like a diseased crow in a garbage dump, eating a syringe.

But it would also work with attack ads. If you showed footage of McCain hugging Bush, screaming, trying to smile, etc. and showed quotes some of his lies and attempts at policy, or really if you showed McCain in any context, and then had Morgan Freeman say, “John McCain. You ought to be ashamed,” people would be overcome with embarrassment for McCain. He would distress American families even more than he already does. “I’m sorry,” Freeman would narrate, “I guess you’ve just let us down.” It would be instant catharsis of the Buchanan-Rove political era as everyone instinctively tried to make Morgan proud of them. As someone once put it, we’ve crawled through a river of shit, and now we'll come out clean on the other side.

Seriously, Obama really should do this.

Hilarious Ineptitude

Earlier today I actually read one of the things I linked to in a previous post, and it turned out to be hilarious. It was a Newsweek article in the last post, and it was embedded in the phrase "fucking up an applesauce purchase". Basically it's about the McCain campaign's numerous failed attempts to have even one good media moment, and as far as I could tell, it's not an opinion piece- it's supposed to be pretty straightforward coverage. This part pretty much sums up his entire campaign so far:

Less than an hour after announcing the photo op, the campaign abruptly canceled, citing Hurricane Dolly, which was swirling near the Texas coast. Worse, a runaway barge along the Mississippi River had rammed into a 600-foot oil tanker that morning, leaving a 12-mile-long oil slick that blanketed New Orleans in diesel fumes.

The campaign's big photo op of the week turned out to be a visit to a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pa.—where McCain was photographed in front of a display of processed cheese. As the candidate roamed through the store, his campaign's lanky cameraman knocked over a shelf of Mott's applesauce. The jars skittered across the floor past the senator's feet. When he paused to take questions from reporters, he was briefly drowned out by an announcement on the store's PA system.

Clearly McCain's campaign is being handled by unspeakably cruel Democrats. Consider: Why else would you schedule a major media event on a grotesque eyesore in the middle of the ocean? Especially during a disaster so big that people could literally see it from outer space days beforehand? A runaway barge? Did you have to spray diesel fumes on the Katrina victims? And assuming it was a good idea to make your "big photo op" a trip to the grocery store, couldn't you at least put the candidate in front of the good cheese? And not kick over the damn applesauce? And ask the PA guy to shut up for ten goddamn minutes while the potential next President tries to talk to the three reporters in not even the sixth-biggest city in Pennsylvania?
Amazingly, the rest of the article pretty strongly proves that this is not Democratic sabotage, but the tattered remains of GOP strategy, which could be loosely described as the blind eating the blind. Other quotes from the article:

• "Even Fox News broke away from live coverage of the senator's town-hall meeting to follow the plight of Lil' Smokey, a black bear cub rescued from the California wildfires."
• "McCain has resisted pleas from his aides to cut back on the visually dull town-hall meetings he loves..."
• "His staff can spend weeks organizing an elaborate campaign appearance, only to have McCain ignore his stage directions."
• "McCain aides ordered reporters not to turn to look at the senator as he walked to the microphones, fearing he would catch sight of a familiar face and start talking before he reached the photogenic backdrop."
• "Instead, he has memorized his remarks to make his delivery more natural—and to help him stay "on message." This has been especially difficult for McCain, who continues to riff on any topic that comes to mind..."

McCain's aides are literally pleading with him to just go all the way to the podium and say the stuff he agreed to say, the stuff that is written on a teleprompter he can look at if he just walks all the way over to it. But no, he wants to go to visually dull places and veer off to talk about the North Dakota/Mexico border with a random reporter standing in front of the Hideous Burn Victims for McCain. You deviate from that plan and you get hurricanes, oil spills on poverty victims, and destroying tiny grocery stores where the owners don't even stop working for your visit.
Somehow McCain is still competitive in this race. The best candidate from either party in decades is losing to an irritable doddering old man who can't even live up to to the stupidest campaign tactics in generations. With just a little savvy, or "the combined efforts of every working mind in the GOP", a McCain/Lil' Smokey ticket will trounce Obama come fall.

What the hell

Lately, John McCain has been on a tear of weird, unnecessary gaffes. At the current pace, his advisors are going to have to work really hard to maken sure he only names his Vice President once, and that it's a real person ("McCain/Mr. Magoo '08!"). Normally it's petty and useless to focus on gaffes, but it's starting to seem like this is some sort of perverse attention-grabbing scheme. Or maybe Curtis was right, and McCain is a true patriot desperately trying to get Obama elected for the good of America.
Either way, the McCain gaffes break down into three basic categories. First, we have Probably Just Senility, which includes:

• Confusing Somalia and the Sudan
• Referring to Putin as the President of Germany
• Referring to Czechoslovakia three different times, even though it has not existed for over 15 years
• Mentioning the Iraq/Pakistan border (roughly the equivalent, in terms of distance, of the North Dakota/Mexico border)
• Describing his Vice Presidential vetting process as "a Google"
• Describing his favorite blogs , which "Brooke and Mark" show him, as Drudge (not a blog), Politico (not a blog), and RealPolitics (not a thing)
• Screwing up his own anecdote about giving his Vietnamese captors the names of various Green Bay Packers (recently he said it was the Pittsburgh Steelers), even though he has told this story probably hundreds of times for forty years, and it's his own fucking story

The second category is Horrible Judgment Calls, which includes the subcategory Why Would Anyone Tell This Joke, which includes:

• Two different jokes about killing Iranians
• A joke about how then-teenaged Chelsea Clinton was so ugly because her dad was Janet Reno
• A joke about a gorilla raping a woman

And in the non-joke section, we have:

• Pressuring Obama into going abroad, where he sank three pointers and inspired nations, then criticizing him for going abroad
• Scheduling a press conference for an oil rig, right before a hurricane
• Having his wife put plagiarized recipes on the campaign website, instead of just not putting recipes on the campaign website
• Hinging his energy plan on gas taxes and drilling, even though he himself admits that neither will do anything
• Countering Obama's success abroad by fucking up an applesauce purchase on TV

Finally, we have Not Knowing Basic Facts About His Only Political Interest, Which Is War. This includes:

• Thinking that the Anbar Awakening was caused by the surge, even though it happened six months before the surge, and then getting mad at Obama for disagreeing
• Five years after the war started, not knowing basic facts about Al-Qaeda, Iran, the difference between Sunni and Shi'a, and Iraq, all at once
• Saying that troops were down to pre-surge levels when they were actually 20,000 troops above them
• Thinking that the Iraq War was a good idea in the first place

What the hell? What does his campaign staff even do? Are they literally just there to drive his bus? Has he given up? Maybe at the convention he'll change "Peace Prosperity Reform" to "Apathy Confusion Whatever" and the Straight Talk Express will become the "Ah, Fuck It Express". Maybe he's self-handicapping so he won't feel bad, i.e., "Hell, I came in second and I didn't even do anything." Maybe he just expects to be dead before the election. The debates this time around should be awesome.