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.