# 81 But Pennsylvania is Not in Play

It appears that, days and weeks after I had listed Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia in Obama's electoral vote total, John King and his Magic Board on CNN have done the same. I almost couldn't believe my eyes when I saw his board last night, Blue islands in parts of what for dubya had been a Red sea. I'm not surprised, of course, since Obama is running increasingly ahead in those states--as indeed he is in national polls as well, by his largest margin yet, 52 to 42--and McCain is now trying to make headway in Pennsylvania to compensate for the potential loss of five states that went Red four years ago. But Obama is still running a double-digit lead in PA, and shows no signs of losing it. He and Joe and Biden have been making occasional stops there, just to remind the voters that there's still an election coming up.

FL, OH, MO and NC remain tossups, though at this point Obama doesn't actually need any of those to win the election. However, it would be meaningful if he (a) indeed were to be elected president, and (b) were to garner more than 300 electoral votes. The larger the win, the more bargaining power he has with a congress that will likely have more Democrats anyway.

Once again, my familiar caveat: all bets are off if the polls don't reflect latent racism that occasionally bubbles to the surface.

One footnote: 55% of people polled by CNN/USA say that Sarah Palin is "Unqualified" for the Vice Presidency and to be President. The negative campaigning imposed on Palin by her handlers has backfired big time.

-- triton --

#72 Strategy vs. Tactics

Sarah Painful mentioned, and almost discussed, "the difference between 'strategy' and 'tactics' " during her part of the debate this past week. Of course, as with so many other topics (that, however, Gwen Ifill was actually asking about), Painful did not discuss even this one that she had brought up herself.

But we've been getting practical examples during this past week of the Republicans' distinction between "strategy" and "tactics."

Republican strategy: to withdraw most of its campaign support from Michigan, because Obama has opened up close to a double-digit lead in the polls there.

Republican strategy: to keep putting money into five states that Kerry carried in 2004 (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire and, now, Maine).

Republican Strategy: to put more money into Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, ten states that dubya carried four years ago.

Unfortunately for McCain, he's trailing Obama in the polls in the first group, the states that went Blue for Kerry, and he's trailing, tied, or at best only slightly ahead in the polls in the ten states listed above that went Red in 2004.

Now I have to repeat that I'm not sure we can particularly trust the polls this year, given the accuracy of polls in previous elections with Black vs. White nominees running for other offices. But if we practice "the willing suspension of disbelief" (thank you Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was NOT talking about politics when he used that phrase), then the electoral college could play out very differently this election than last time around.

Republican Tactics: more money in the ten Red states listed above is the Republican admission of desperation. Desperate times call for desperate measures (gee, I wish I had coined that expression). And so, the Republican shift in "tactics": from normal-dirty to REALLY-dirty.

That's right. So far, they've attacked Obama's qualifications, they've attacked what has been said or done by people he knows, and now they're going after his character, his integrity, directly. Sarah Painful was on the news yesterday, indicating that Barack Obama has consorted with terrorists. I don't think she used the word "consorted" (it does have three syllables, after all) but, whatever word she did use, that's what she meant. She was referring to a 1960s era terrorist against whom the government had brought up charges...and then dropped the charges. The man is now a University of Chicago professor, and we all know of the surveys listing university professors as among the most highly respected profession (I'm not making that up). The truth is, Obama had worked with him to help a non-profit organization in Illinois in the 1990s, thirty years after the charges were filed and more than twenty years after the charges were dropped.

Never mind, by the bye, that Painful had chided Joe Biden this past week during the debate, "There you go again, Joe, looking to the past!" when Biden tried to tie John McCain to the bush administration's failed policies.

I think attacking Obama's character will fail: it will create a strong, indignant backlash against Republicans nationally, and may actually drag down Republicans who are further down the ticket rather than just affecting John McCain at the top. Such ad hominem attacks are indeed a sign of desperation. As tactics, they will also be futile.

-- triton --

#70 Biden's Passion

Several bloggers and TV commentators have mentioned Joe Biden's passion that surfaced a few times last night. They point particularly to his emotional reference to the loss of his first wife and infant daughter. That was a touching moment, and it did steal the thunder from Sarah Painful's introducing what it's like to be a parent with a job and home responsibilities and government responsibilities.

But I thought Biden's passion was at its strongest when he interrupted Gwen Ifill after Painful finished referring--for the umpteenth time--to McCain and herself as "mavericks." Biden said (and these are close to but probably not exact quotes), "Gwen, I have to interrupt you at this point to refute what the governor has said about John and her being mavericks. I love John [a point he made just a liiiiiittle too often last night], but he's no maverick most of the time, and certainly NOT on the issues that matter most to the American middle class." And then Biden looked straight to the camera, which zeroed in on his face, and he listed the litany of times that McCain supported the dubya administration's policies that adversely affected normal, middle-class Americans. It was, from my point of view, the most powerful moment in the debate.

It is this kind of passion, straight from the heart, that connects Joe Biden with the blue-collar voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania and, I hope, Ohio.

Next post: a return to the states that are moving.

-- triton --

#68 The October Surprise (sneak preview)

It's too early to count McCain out yet, even though he "suspended" his campaign to make sure the bailout would be agreed upon and passed. All his alleged campaign suspension and his threats not to attend the debate accomplished was to emphasize how impulsive and erratic his behavior is.

Barney Frank had the best line. When the Republicans blamed Nancy Pelosi for souring the deal because she accused the Republicans of being extremists, Frank said (almost exact quote), "Oh, so the Republicans got their feelings hurt, and now they're taking it out on the whole country."

Good man Barney; that puts the blame where it belongs, on the ~70% of House Republicans who voted against the bailout.

But all is not lost for John McCain. The famous "October surprise" awaits in the wings. Now that the bailout as proposed to the House of Representatives has failed (at least temporarily), with an overwhelming majority of the Republicans voting against it--and McCain campaigned with these same Republicans to support it so he could take credit--John McCain can ride in to the rescue.

And now the October surprise. Remember: you read it here first. (If it's wrong, you don't remember where you read it.)

John McCain will resolve the bailout bust by...

(are you ready?)


(are you sure you're ready for this one?)



(last chance to bail out on the bailout...)




John McCain will resolve the bailout bust by...using Cindy McCain's money to buy up all the rotten mortgages, and restore confidence in the banking system, and save the stock market, and bring Republicans and Democrats back together again in one harmonious, glorious, unified governmental collaboration! And he'll WIN! And JOHN McCAIN WILL BE PRESIDENT!! And SARAH PALIN WILL BE...




[uh oh. i gotta stop taking those pills.]

-- triton --

#61 "Houston, we have a problem."

I know I wrote that I was going to take some time off to let the conventions settle in to our collective psyches, in order to get a clearer idea of where the election stands. But we're not just talking about a space shuttle in contact with Houston. Sarah Palin is on a God-mission that is dangerous to the constitutional separation of church and state. Nothing frosts my cake more than this kind of attempted violation of the Constitution. I and many of my friends, colleagues, and fellow and sister Americans are members of religious and ethnic minorities. She isn't just a VP candidate anymore. She is a clear and present danger to the sacred concept that our Founding Fathers created more than two hundred years ago. Here's the news article:

----- ----- -----

By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer Wed Sep 3, 7:23 PM ET

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a "task that is from God."

In an address last June, the Republican vice presidential candidate also urged ministry students to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it "God's will."

Palin asked the students to pray for the troops in Iraq, and noted that her eldest son, Track, was expected to be deployed there.

"Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," she said. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."
A video of the speech was posted at the Wasilla Assembly of God's Web site before finding its way on to other sites on the Internet.

Palin told graduating students of the church's School of Ministry, "What I need to do is strike a deal with you guys." As they preached the love of Jesus throughout Alaska, she said, she'd work to implement God's will from the governor's office, including creating jobs by building a pipeline to bring North Slope natural gas to North American markets.

"God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that," she said.

"I can do my job there in developing our natural resources and doing things like getting the roads paved and making sure our troopers have their cop cars and their uniforms and their guns, and making sure our public schools are funded," she added. "But really all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God."

Palin attended the evangelical church from the time she was a teenager until 2002, the church said in a statement posted on its Web site. She has continued to attend special conferences and meetings there. Religious conservatives have welcomed her selection as John McCain's running mate.

Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, lamented Palin's comments.

"I miss the days when pastors delivered sermons and politicians delivered political speeches," he said. "The United States is increasingly diverse religiously. The job of a president is to unify all those different people and bring them together around policy goals, not to act as a kind of national pastor and bring people to God."

The section of the church's Web site where videos of past sermons were posted was shut down Wednesday, and a message was posted saying that the site "was never intended to handle the traffic it has received in the last few days."

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-- triton --

#60 She is no Ronald Reagan. Give us a few weeks.

I didn't see all of Sarah Palin's "Reagan-esque" speech tonight, but I wasn't impressed by the clips and sound bites all the news stations replayed as her best moments. Of course, I was one of those few Americans who wasn't impressed by Ronald Reagan either. Give the man a script or even a few lines that he could memorize, and he became The Great Orator. Once he finished the script and was answering questions extemporaenously, he could barely garble two sentences together, much less a coherent thought. And people forget that the phrase "The Great Orator" was initially coined by the media ironically because of his INability to speak without a strong script in front of him or already memorized. The lesson is, beware of irony lest the American public AND subsequently even the media miss it and, instead, take it literally.

Actually, I suspect Sarah Palin, who is after all a University of Idaho graduate, can string sentences and thoughts together even without a script. And hence she is no Ronald Reagan. As an off-the-cuff speaker, she may be better, and that's something Joe Biden better be alert to when he enters their sole debate.

More importantly--to me, if not to the mass of American voters or to the media--what she said tonight can easily be turned against the Republican party: for just one example, the liberals ignoring the people in favor of their own agendas. [Q: Who in the past eight years of presidency and six of the past eight years in control of Congress passed tax breaks for the uber-wealthy and passed the cost on to the middle class?] [A: the Republicans]

Now it's time to give ourselves a few weeks to let the dust settle, to let the Republican ultra-right wing base enjoy its new hero, and let the polls reflect a bump for McCain as a result of Palin. It's actually, however, not a good thing for the presidential nominee to be overshadowed by his vice presidential running mate, to (pun intended) pale in comparison.

Before the election, people enamored of Sarah will come to remember that John is at the head of the ticket. Besides, I believe that James Carville is as right today as he was sixteen years ago: It is the economy that will finally drive the vote in this election. Once the media or the Democrats seize upon the paucity of fresh ideas in the Republican platform, especially to improve the status of the millions of Americans who are worse off today than they were four years ago (echoes of Ronald Reagan anyone?), the economy will trump the voting power of the energized Republican far-right base.

And then we have only latent racism to worry about. I hate to keep coming back to that idea, but I have no way of knowing if it's still out there waiting to influence votes, or just a throwback to the Pennsylvania Democratic primary which voters have gotten over.

I plan to sit back over the next two or three weeks, take a few long drives in a fuel-efficient car, watch some news but not enough to get upset, and then wait for the mid/late September poll results. By then, the effects of the conventions will have moderated, and perhaps the Republicans will decrease their pit bull attacks and increase their policy pronouncements. Now that would be a refreshing change.

Oh, by the way, in my list of tossup states, move Minnesota off of that list and onto the Democratic list. Without Pawlenty on the Republican ticket, I don't see MN going Red this year. That move won't change my projected electoral vote totals in my July 5 post, since I had--for electoral total purposes only--assigned all the tossup states to one or the other candidate, and I had put MN's ten votes in Obama's column. I just don't see it as much of a tossup anymore. Still Obama 301, McCain 237.

Have a good three weeks.

-- triton --

#58 The Vetting of Sarah Palin

I love that title. I used it yesterday in an email to a friend, and it sounded so...so...film noir-ish. The first Film Noir was apparently a 1948 RKO production called "Stranger on the Third Floor." I don't know if Sarah Palin has a third floor to her house, but omyword is she a stranger to the public.

Bottom line: John McCain acted impulsively to secure his Republican ultra-conservative base, did NOT vet her very well, and ignored the advice of his close advisors. Yet, it may work out for him. P.T. Barnum said, "Never underestimate the stupidity of the American public," as people, walking past the caged animals, followed the signs "to the Egress."

The bloggers' rumors about Palin started almost immediately upon her selection: her fifth child, the bloggers perhaps erroneously reported, is really her grandson, Bristol's child. As a result of those internet rumors, she has had to make public that seventeen year old Bristol is currently pregnant, will keep the baby, and will marry the baby's father. I'm just waiting for the internet folk to ask the question, Is this pregnancy actually Bristol's second?

Too much in the way of evil rumors can backfire on the rumor-mongers, and create a sympathy vote for Sarah Palin. That is understandable, but it would be misplaced.

True sympathy should be with the American people, who may end up with another term of a Republican administration. Some analysts have assumed McCain was hoping to get the votes of some of Hillary's disaffected female supporters, who may still be angry with Obama. That would be a horribly patronizing view of women by McCain, and is currently not being supported by the polls. The women who will vote for McCain because he put SP on his ticket would have come around to vote for him anyway. They are the extreme right wing, fundamentalist, anti-choice, hypocritical, "family values" folk.

Don't you wish I'd stop being shy and start speaking my mind? In this election, it's the Democratic candidates with the true family values.

Now that the tickets are set (assuming the Republicans do put Palin on the ticket this week), the Democrats need to do at least three things:

(1) Given the amount of negative campaigning that has already occurred, mainly by the Republicans, the Democrats would do well to find some innocuous way to call attention to McCain's impulsiveness and his quick temper. A person with those qualities is too dangerous to be trusted with having to make monumental decisions quickly--or at all.

(2) The Democrats might blow it once again, but they have been handed THE golden opportunity to seize the middle of the political spectrum in this election. John McCain is a conservative in his political positions, but not conservative enough to appeal to the far-right Republican base, so he has chosen as his running mate someone who stands so far right that she risks falling off the edge of the earth. With Joe Biden on the ticket, the Democrats have a legitimate chance to be the centrists in this election.

(3) Finally, the Democrats would do well to say little about Sarah Palin. They can concentrate on McCain and the issues, and let the media do whatever background checking on Palin their investigative journalists want to do. Let the media investigate the potential "troopergate" scandal already brewing in Alaska, and anything else they want to check up on.

Very little is known about her: I find it amazing that Palin spent her junior and senior years at the University of Idaho, and the local press has yet to find anyone who actually knew her well enough to say something positive OR negative. One professor acknowledged that she was in one of his classes, but didn't really know much about her. Several students--including the president of the student government while she was at UI--said the same: 'we didn't really know much about her' is the point they've all made. Except for one student who apparently did know her: this former classmate admitted being "really surprised that she was chosen to be--Vice President??!"

Not a ringing endorsement of one's classmate.

But given the appetite of the press, the vetting of Sarah Palin has just begun.

#57 A Great Article about John McCain's Choice, and a Further Electoral Vote Prediction

I offer the following article (actually the first part of a longer article which deals with McCain's VP choice), which reinforces my own suspicions: except for latent racism, which can't be measured, I think Obama could win big.

In my last electoral college projections (post #35, on July 5), assigning the Tossup states as I saw them at that time, I had Obama with 298 electoral votes and McCain with 237. That of course doesn't mean he'll stay there, or that he or Biden couldn't squander what I have projected as a lead. But I think McCain has at least as much a chance to make mistakes as do Obama or Biden . And I also believe that Obama will "win" at least two of the three debates with McCain.

Barring politically-motivated manipulation of foreign events by the bush administration, deteriorating economic conditions in the United States could make Obama's margin of victory closer to a hundred electoral votes than my July 5 projection of a sixty-one point victory.

Everything below the dashes is directly quoted/triton

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Jim VandeHei, John F. Harris
Sat Aug 30, 9:57 AM ET

The selection of a running mate is among the most consequential, most defining decisions a presidential nominee can make. John McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says a lot about his decison-making — and some of it is downright breathtaking.

We knew McCain is a politician who relishes improvisation, and likes to go with his gut. But it is remarkable that someone who has repeatedly emphasized experience in this campaign named an inexperienced governor he barely knew to be his No. 2. Whatever you think of the pick, here are six things it tells us about McCain:

1. He’s desperate. Let’s stop pretending this race is as close as national polling suggests. The truth is McCain is essentially tied or trailing in every swing state that matters — and too close for comfort in several states like Indiana and Montana the GOP usually wins pretty easily in presidential races. On top of that, voters seem very inclined to elect Democrats in general this election — and very sick of the Bush years.

McCain could easily lose in an electoral landslide. That is the private view of Democrats and Republicans alike.

McCain’s pick shows he is not pretending. Politicians, even “mavericks” like McCain, play it safe when they think they are winning — or see an easy path to winning. They roll the dice only when they know that the risks of conventionality are greater than the risks of boldness.

The Republican brand is a mess. McCain is reasonably concluding that it won’t work to replicate George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s electoral formula, based around national security and a big advantage among Y chromosomes, from 2004.

“She’s a fresh new face in a party that’s dying for one — the antidote to boring white men,” a campaign official said.

Palin, the logic goes, will prompt voters to give him a second look — especially women who have watched Democrats reject Hillary Rodham Clinton for Barack Obama.

The risks of a backlash from choosing someone so unknown and so untested are obvious. In one swift stroke, McCain demolished what had been one of his main arguments against Obama.
“I think we’re going to have to examine our tag line, ‘dangerously inexperienced,’” a top McCain official said wryly.

2. He’s willing to gamble — bigtime. Let’s face it: This is not the pick of a self-confident candidate. It is the political equivalent of a trick play or, as some Democrats called it, a Hail Mary pass in football. McCain talks incessantly about experience, and then goes and selects a woman he hardly knows, who hardly knows foreign policy and who can hardly be seen as instantly ready for the presidency.

He is smart enough to know it could work, at least politically. Many Republicans see this pick as a brilliant stroke because it will be difficult for Democrats to run hard against a woman in the wake of the Hillary Clinton drama. Will this push those disgruntled Hillary voters McCain’s way? Perhaps. But this is hardly aimed at them: It is directed at the huge bloc of independent women — especially those who do not see abortion as a make-or-break issue — who could decide this election.

McCain has a history of taking dares. Palin represents his biggest one yet.

3. He’s worried about the political implications of his age. Like a driver overcorrecting out of a swerve, he chooses someone who is two years younger than the youthful Obama, and 28 years younger than he is. (He turned 72 Friday.) The father-daughter comparison was inevitable when they appeared next to each other.

4. He’s not worried about the actuarial implications of his age. He thinks he’s in fine fettle, and Palin wouldn’t be performing the only constitutional duty of a vice president, which is standing by in case a president dies or becomes incapacitated. If he was really concerned about an inexperienced person sitting in the Oval Office we would be writing about vice presidential nominee Mitt Romney or Tom Ridge or Condoleezza Rice.

There is no plausible way that McCain could say that he picked Palin, who was only elected governor in 2006 and whose most extended public service was as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population 8,471), because she was ready to be president on Day One.

Nor can McCain argue that he was looking for someone he could trust as a close adviser. Most people know the staff at the local Starbucks better than McCain knows Palin. They met for the first time last February at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington. Then, they spoke again — by phone — on Sunday while she was at the Alaska state fair and he was at home in Arizona.

McCain has made a mockery out of his campaign's longtime contention that Barack Obama is too dangerously inexperienced to be commander in chief. Now, the Democratic ticket boasts 40 years of national experience (four years for Obama and 36 years for Joseph Biden of Delaware), while the Republican ticket has 26 (McCain’s four yeasr in the House and 22 in the Senate.)
The McCain campaign has made a calculation that most voters don’t really care about the national experience or credentials of a vice president, and that Palin’s ebullient personality and reputation as a refomer who took on cesspool politics in Alaska matters more.

5. He’s worried about his conservative base. If he had room to maneuver, there were lots of people McCain could have selected who would have represented a break from Washington politics as usual. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman comes to mind (and it certainly came to McCain’s throughout the process). He had no such room. GOP stalwarts were furious over trial balloons about the possibility of choosing a supporter of abortion rights, including the possibility that he would reach out to his friend.

Palin is an ardent opponent of abortion who was previously scheduled to keynote the Republican National Coalition for Life's "Life of the Party" event in the Twin Cities this week.

“She’s really a perfect selection,” said Darla St. Martin, the Co-Director of the National Right to Life Committee. It is no secret McCain wanted to shake things up in this race — and he realized he was limited to a shake-up conservatives could stomach.

#56 Sarah Palin and Personal Income

There. I've done it again. I've implied a relationship between two ideas that seem peripherally related at best, because I am not talking about Sarah Palin's personal income. But these two topics are related, and have a significant effect on John McCain's campaign.

(1) Let's take Sarah Palin first. She graduated (as Sarah Heath) from the University of Idaho with a B.S. in Journalism a little more than 20 years ago. Those of you who know me also know that I taught at UI from 1970 to 2002, but, no, I didn't know her. Most of that time I was deaning on the graduate level, and she wasn't a student in the few undergraduate courses I asked to teach.

Palin is conservative in most areas, including economics, religion, and gun rights. She will be an asset to the Republican ticket in her appeal to any still-disgruntled Hillary supporters. Whether she will actually win any of them over is to be determined. Like Joe Biden with Delaware, she does not add her home state to her party's electoral votes, since both Delaware and Alaska were expected to go Democratic and Republican respectively anyway.

Republican advisors to McCain must have sized up Hillary's supporters as being very vulnerable to desert the Democratic party despite Obama's courting of them. On that basis, they seem to have decided to do everything possible to convince disaffected HRC supporters to cross over on November 4 to vote for a woman as vice president. And that tactic may work to some extent.

But here's the big question, and it's one the Democrats may have to imply rather than ask directly, depending on how nasty or nice the rest of the campaign gets. Given McCain's increasing emotional and mental debilities, is she ready to become president at a moment's notice? "At 3 a.m.?" as Hillary might ask.

And, yes, I said "debilities." Perhaps he will shed that image at the Republican convention, but right now he fluctuates between appearing almost on top of whatever he's talking about, and appearing borderline bewildered. He is a poor public speaker, so I'm really interested to see how he does with his acceptance speech. His impulsiveness behind the scenes is now pretty well publicized.

On balance, as a female and a conservative, Sarah Palin probably helps the Republican ticket marinally by securing its base a bit more and potentially gaining some women's votes. Younger than Obama, and with McCain's age an issue, however, Palin does not seem to help it in that area, especially given her own lack of governmental experience. I don't know what kind of speaker she is, but the one debate between her and Joe Biden should be fun to watch, the young conservative and the old moderate.

(2) Personal income is a major issue. Heck, the economy is a major issue. Only in part because of the expiration of the stimulus checks, personal income fell in July by the biggest drop in three years, after moving up strongly during the time that the stimulus checks were distributed. It appears (according to AP and CNN reports) that much of the additional income from the stimulus went to pay for gas and food, the two major items whose costs increased greatly during the last year (from Mark Vitner, senior economst at Wachovia).

And now how the two topics in this post are actually related: I think John McCain did well NOT to choose Mitt Romney (for all the reasons I've discussed in previous posts), whose alleged economic savvy would have helped McCain in that area. The economy is in much deeper trouble than the administration, or Republicans in general, are willing to admit, and Barack Obama has the golden opportunity to tap into that unrest among millions of Americans. Whether he will succeed is another matter. Three major battleground states--Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan--will be reflecting the economic problems in the country. Will their voters reflect their unhappiness with eight years of Republican economic mismanagement? Although Obama's speech last night I thought was masterful in its balance of attacks on Republican policies and its proposals of positive change for middle- and lower-economic-class Americans, I am still concerned about latent racism among some number of the electorate. Pennsylvania has already shown some of that latent racism in the exit polls during the Democratic primary; I saw Ohio's sometimes-NOT-so-latent racism when I lived there while in graduate school in the 1960s. Have Ohio's attitudes changed in forty years? I hope so.

-- triton --