Holy Shit This Election is Important

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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.

T-minus Six weeks

This was a rough week for McCain. the Financial Crisis and the fade of the convention bounce have left him down in a lot of polls, and led to a dramatic reversal of fortune in 538's map.

Lately I've gotten a little more wary of 538's calculation of national polls. Earlier, when state-by-state data was less frequent, it made sense to buffer the state numbers with the national numbers, but right now I think it's creating a deceptive map. Obama looks like an overwhelming favorite on this map, but state by state, he's in a tight race. Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Hampshire are the four Kerry states where he has to commit the most to defense. The Obama victory plan comes down to holding the Kerry states, plus Iowa, New Mexico, and at least one of this group (Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Florida). McCain's best bet is all about minimizing those Bush losses and flipping one of the vulnerable Rust Belt states, particularly Michigan or Pennsylvania.

Obama is overall about a +3 across the polling board. We'll see if that's an illusory bump, with the economic news playing to his advantage lately, or if the race has actually stabilized in his favor.

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