The classic conservative wrap on liberalism is
that sexual permissiveness led to numerous social problems including teen
pregnancy and abortion. Obama declared, in effect, that he agreed with that
critique. "Cavalier" sex, he said, cost society.
Obama's skin color has obscured a pretty basic fact about him: he seems to have had a very conservative private life as a public figure. His marriage and family life have been much more traditional than John McCain's - someone who admits to promiscuity and adultery and divorce. Unlike McCain he's a long-time regular church-goer. Biden is also a family man, devoted to his kids and first and second wife, and a tee-totaler.
...a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.
The left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life and predictably wielding the race card once again. It’s standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine. ...
Left-wing blogs immediately went to work, blaring headlines like “Not A Real $250k Plumber!” Next, they falsely accused Wurzelbacher of not being registered to vote—he’s registered in Lucas County, Ohio, and voted as a Republican in this year’s primary. ...
A word for all the faux outraged leftists accusing conservative bloggers of waging a “smear campaign:” Asking questions and subjecting political anecdotes to scrutiny are what journalists should be doing.
You can watch Obama's remarks here. Both were good, but McCain was much funnier. He was also gracious. So the old McCain still exists. He just isn't campaigning.
Peggy Noonan is dead right that both candidates are unserious about spending:
Mr. Obama continued to claim he will remove
wasteful spending by sitting down with the federal budget and going through it
"line by line." This is absurd, and he must know it. Mr. McCain
continued to vow he will "balance the budget" in the next four years.
Who believes that? Does even he?
And she is dead right about this:
We have seen Mrs.
Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that
she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding
one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office.
And I am immensely grateful for this:
In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.
It's not that the squiggly lines aren't fun to watch. Rather, they're too much fun to watch. It's hard to avert your eyes from them. It's hard to separate your own, independent reaction from theirs. And it's certainly hard to integrate back into to the non-squiggly universe once you've gotten hooked on the squigglys.
The hope for a real change in American foreign policy is a fragile one:
Finally, a German sitting in the back of the room lent a note of
cynicism to the discussion. "I think we Europeans are going to be very
disappointed by Obama," he said. "American foreign policy will continue
to alienate Europeans, no matter who is president." Most of the
Americans in the room concurred; Mr. Obama has sounded quite hawkish on
using force in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The perception of change, at
least in foreign policy, is probably superficial.
So what would it take for McCain to come back at this point? Ohio and Florida, above all else.
Ohio and Florida are the largest states that are in Obama's row but still close. McCain led in both states in August and the first half of September. Without them, it is hopeless. With them, he still needs more, but they are the necessary conditions for a win.
Can he do it? The trends in Ohio and Florida offer a small glimmer of hope. While most states have continued to move in Obama's direction (see PA, MI and WI), these two have leveled off, and in Ohio moved back in McCain's direction.
My view is that McCain will win Ohio. He will win all of Appalachia. There was only one reason white Appalachian Democrats suddenly discovered Hillary Clinton was their idol, having despised her for years. It's the same reason McCain will win Ohio. It has nothing to do with Clinton or McCain.
Using the controversy over Newsweek's Palin cover as a jumping off point, Virginia Postrel considers the politics of political portraiture:
Partisans demand that magazine portraits glamorize their heroes for the same reason my friend hired a professional photographer. Humans seem hard-wired to assume that good-looking means good and, conversely, to equate physical flaws with character flaws. We may preach that beauty is skin deep, but we’re equally certain that portraits “reveal character.” In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.
...the fact that both Obama and McCain chose so assiduously not to invoke “God” in any form in any of their debates is noteworthy, not least to people who care about the presence of religion in politics. "Whether intentional or not the discussion of God and the role of faith appears to have been relegated to the Saddleback forum in this general election,” says Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, who calls the development “troubling.”
"Troubling?" To anyone who takes religious faith seriously, the secular tone of the debates comes as a huge relief. Of course, the power of the Christianist veto in the GOP is demonstrated as much by what hasn't happened as by what has.
1) The exchange over abortion. In many ways, the whole thing was
typical. McCain started strong, talking about building a culture of
life. As a practicing Catholic, this language was pretty strong with
me and pulled at my instincts. I was at first dissatisfied with
Obama's more legal discussion, and thought that was the end of the
exchange. But in the follow-up, McCain then went on to make a bunch of
wild allegations about Obama and abortion, ostensibly, I guess, to
throw him off. Obama was forced, once again, to take up his valuable
time answering these outrageous claims, but then he clinched in when he
said, "Surely, there is common ground...." and then articulated the
ideas that many progressive Catholics share about abortion. This was
all substance. (And how many women did McCain alienate by putting a
mother's health in scare quotes?)
I found the whole exchange so telling. For all to see, there was
McCain's enitre MO for this campaign: soundbite, attack, and then –
nothing of substance, simply because there's nothing there. No ideas,
no policies, no integrity.
National Review's John J Miller teases his audio interview with Claire Berlinski thus:
We talk about why people still talk about Thatcher after all these years, how the Iron Lady would respond to the financial crisis, and whether Berlinski sees any Thatcher in Sarah Palin.
Claire Berlinski, author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, says, “[H]er lower-middle class background inspired a degree of snobbery among her critics…that is absolutely shocking…who found her…‘middle-class gentility odious’, who said she literally made them sick.”
Get the implication? But the actual interview reveals that Berlinski, like anyone else who knows anything about Margaret Thatcher, finds the comparison with Palin as absurd as it is insulting:
JM: Do you see any of Margaret Thatcher in Sarah Palin?
CB: Honestly, no. I mean, I know we'd all like to believe that we see Margaret Thatcher in Sarah Palin, but I'd like to point out that there are some extremely significant differences.
"So North Carolina, I appreciate you all so much, who are here who
already get it. You know, maybe I'm preaching to the choir a little bit
here, but being here encourages me because I know that I'm not alone
and I'll send this message back to John McCain also. At those times on
the campaign trail when sometimes it's easy to get a little bit
discouraged, when, you know, when you happen to turn on the news when
your campaign staffers will let you turn on the news," Palin said,
prompting laughter from the group. "Usually they're like 'Oh my gosh,
don't watch. You're going to, you know, you're going to get depressed.'"
We know that Palin refuses to have a press conference, or to allow even follow-up questions from Alaskan reporters on Troopergate, when she simply flatly denied reality. Now she has persuaded the secret service to bar reporters from even interviewing her supporters. Milbank:
In cooperation with the Palin campaign, they've started preventing
reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the
crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty -- protecting the
protectee -- and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of
the candidate.
This is how Palin treated government troopers in Alaska: as her personal tools. She despises a free press and accountability and transparency. She set up secret email accounts in Alaska, lied repeatedly to reporters, has declared basic factual requests for records impermissable, and proposes to dispense with the filter of a free media. She is Putin in make-up. And McCain is in danger of becoming Medvedev.
The choice is made easy in part by Mr. McCain's disappointing campaign, above all his irresponsible selection of a running mate who is not ready to be president. It is made easy in larger part, though, because of our admiration for Mr. Obama and the impressive qualities he has shown during this long race. Yes, we have reservations and concerns, almost inevitably, given Mr. Obama's relatively brief experience in national politics. But we also have enormous hopes.
A study doesn't actually compare the nature of negativity - "McCain's out of touch" is not regarded as anything different than "Obama's an enemy of the troops" - but simply codes ads as positive, negative and contrast ads (both negative and positive). The bottom line:
Looking at the tone of all of McCain’s advertising from June 4 to
October 4, we found that 47 percent of the McCain spots were negative
(completely focused on Obama), 26 percent were positive (completely
focusing on his own personal story or on his issues or proposals) and
27 percent were contrast ads (a mix of positive and negative messages). What about Obama? Our analysis reveals that 39 percent of all
general election Obama TV ads have been positive (solely about his
record, positions or personal story), 35 percent have been negative
(solely focused on McCain) and 25 percent have been contrast ads -
mixing a bit of both. So, on a proportional basis, the McCain campaign
is and has been more negative than Obama.
Then the study tries to say that because of the volume of Obama's ads, it's a draw. No way.
Michael Brendan Dougherty unplugs from email and blogs:
Immediately, I realized how much anxiety the flow and ease of
communication brings. The annoyance people have when they cannot reach
you. The itch to pick up the silent cell phone and check to see if
anyone has called or texted. The certain knowledge that e-mail is quite
figuratively piling up in your endlessly expansive gmail account. After
you put away the devices that keep you connected to the flow, put them
out of your sight, that anxiety begins to recede, slowly. The
obligation to respond to e-mails almost instantly, or at least within a
few hours, disappears, and you can imagine yourself having normal
conversation, relaxed, the way your grandparents did.
So I spoke at a town hall meeting this morning at a high school in
Manhattan as a representative for the Obama campaign.
When I was discussing Senator Obama's education policy, I brought
up the $4,000 tuition credit for service and asked the crowd of about
300 students how many of them would be willing to do some sort of
service in exchange for the ability to afford college - nearly every
hand went up. It was slightly overwhelming.
Then a few of the students read letters that they wrote to
the candidates. There was a young, straight, African American man
whose letter pleaded with Senator Obama to allow for gay marriage.
McCain was so angry Wednesday night, he looked unhinged at times.
The question is: Why? Clearly, this is nothing new. But last night was
nearly over the top. What is seething down underneath there?
You know I'm all for Freudian, Shakespearean and Jungian analysis (with
a large dash of Orwell thrown in for good measure) - and god knows
McCain has plenty to analyze - but I woke up this morning with this
simple thought:
McCain is just indignant. To his mind, Obama has given him his personal
word on several matters - public financing, town hall meetings, and of
course the infamous lobbying reform bill - and in each case, Obama has
broken his word. His personal word. His man-to-man word. Or so McCain
sees it.
Mikhail Emelianov doesn't understand Americans' disdain for changing your mind:
Whatever happened to the true political values of flexibility, politicking, negotiation, manipulation, and compromise? There is no need to bring up Machiavelli, but certainly politicians have always prided themselves on shrewdness, not naivete and dogmatism. Certainly, there’s plenty of good old backstabbing and manipulative lying both in the public sphere and behind the closed political doors, but why aren’t those things popular with the people? Did American populism kill the true political activity? Is American politics basically a beauty pageant at this point? Where is the strife?
If you want to know why Obama appears to be ahead in this once-solidly Republican state, this reader will clue you in:
They are killing me. I am a registered Republican. I live in Virginia. But I am clearly not a "Virginia Republican". This ticket and loathesome campaign is a disaster - I haven't left the Republican Party so much as it has left me, at least here in the Commonwealth. The party gladly allowed Rove/GWB to cultivate a certain brand of politics to win and hold the White House. And now that the bill has come due, so few wish to face the music. And in the process - and his quest for office - John McCain has embraced that which he professed to repudiate.
Ignorant Christian Fascism is not a recipe for success, it's Saudi Arabia under a different prophet. Count me out. Despite differing with the Democratic platform on a great number of policies, I will gladly vote for the Obama ticket because at a minimum it promises adults at the helm, a rational approach to policymaking, the return of science over theocracy, the restoration of the primacy of the rule of law, and the creative destruction of that assemblage once known as the GOP.
That's where I'm coming from too. They deserve obliteration. For the sake of the country and the sake of conservatism.
From the Department of Things That Make You Go Hmmm, Josh Green gets his hands on some docs:
Putting up a cell phone tower is a process that entails many legal and
regulatory hurdles that create a lengthy public record (some of which
Grimaldi draws on for his piece). And the closer you look, the less
satisfying McCain’s—and especially Verizon’s—account of the towers
turns out to be. Whatever its motivation, Verizon plainly went to
considerable effort and expense to pursue building a permanent tower on
the McCains’ ranch.
I'm the last guy who would defend Kristol, and the campaign aides
are certainly right to perceive Palin as humiliating, but this isn't
Kristol's fault. Sure, he recommended Palin and vouched for her, but
the McCain campaign thought it was wise to listen to Bill Kristol.
"Nearly 48 years ago, a young woman, not yet 18, became pregnant in her freshman year of college. Living
in a time and place in which abortion was generally illegal, she
proceeded to marry the father of her child and gave birth to a son. Perhaps
she would have done so irrespective of the abortion laws at the time,
even if, say, she lived in a legal culture that celebrated abortion as
a fundamental right. Very possibly not," - Ed Whelan, in a post called "Former Fetus Barack Obama", National Review.
My take on the lower ratings: most people have already made up their minds. But it's more than the first debate - if nothing compared with the Palin circus. In a sign of incipent sanity, eight million watched baseball instead.
Drudge discovers the old Gallup model and breaks out the red font!!!. It's going to be a drama-filled two weeks, isn't it? Nothing a nice glass of Merlot and a Xanax can't help with, though.
The latest ad. No mention of homosexuality. Like they're scared or something:
This is the classic approach to fighting for gay equality from the gay/Democratic political establishment. They argue that it works. I sure hope it does.
Obama’s character is a political triumph. His cool, unlike McCain’s tic-filled anger, is tactically deployed; throughout the campaign it’s become his main weapon against crisis and attack. But if he wins, he’ll need to play far more of his psychic register to have any chance of succeeding at the impossible job he’s so skillfully pursued. He’ll have to draw on humor, on empathy, on audacity, on courage, in order to inspire the kind of confidence the country badly lacks and needs. He might even have to get angry.
My column last week focused on Obama's preternatural calm.
I remain skeptical of Obama's real strength in the Appalachian states. Even if the Bradley Effect has waned elsewhere, among the older whiter voters in Ohio, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania, it still matters. You watch. That's why Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida are key.
I have to disagree with your assessment that "[i]t has taken Chris
Buckley until October 2008 to come to the same conclusion" in defense
of real conservatism. Buckley has publicly stated that he was unable
to vote for Bush 43 in 2004, and instead opted to write in the name of
a man he greatly admired: Bush 41. Furthermore, prior to the 2006
congressional elections, Buckley wrote a column endorsing a Democratic
takeover of the House of Representatives. From this, it would seem
that he was an early and principled opponent of the big-government
conservatism that we have seen over the past few years.
I live in Charlotte NC, where today
is the first day of early voting. I drove by two polling
places before 8 this morning and they were both completely mobbed. My
husband has driven to two others in his attempt to vote today, and the
scene has been so ridiculous that he has given up and will try again next
week. At two of the spots where he tried to vote, he witnessed and
was approached by two exceedingly aggressive McCain/Palin volunteers who
were pulling people out of line, handing out brochures, and telling them
"You really need to think carefully about your vote. If you plan to
vote Obama, we would ask that you read this material and reconsider your
vote."
Virginia's state chair, Jeffrey Frederick, recently compared Barack Obama with Osama bin Laden. McCain, given an opportunity, refused to disown him. Now, the RNC has confirmed that McCain will appear at the same rally as Frederick next Saturday. There is no moral difference between McCain and Frederick.
I think all of your posts today about "Joe the Plumber" and
McCain's lack of "vetting" is sort of missing the point. I'm an Obama
partisan, so I don't relish defending the Mac Attack, but it really is
easier (and more politically expedient) to say "Joe the Plumber" than
"Joe Worzelbacher", and besides, you can concede that he was using this
particular Joe to stand in for the more general working class Joes.
Does it really matter that his birth name is Sam, or that he's not
licensed to be a plumber, that he makes less than 250k? Really? McCain may have been
talking directly to him, but that was a rhetorical strategy, to speak
to all those like him. Seems like a lot of sound and fury (signifying
nada) to me.
Fair points, but if you live by the game of anecdote, you also have to die by it. As for actual arguments, it seems that Joe would actually get a tax cut under Obama, and that his general argument - against all progressive taxation - would apply to McCain as much to Obama. For the record, I also oppose punitive, aka "progressive," taxation. But that's not what McCain is proposing. So what was Joe's point? That once you raise taxes on anyone earning over $250,000 a year, there is no stopping you? I don't get it.
Reading your essay "Why I Blog" has forced me to reflect more
intensively on how exactly history will be written,
particularly electoral history, in the future. The
2008 election is historic for a myriad of reasons, but perhaps
the most significant outcome of this election
cycle will be the unprecedented amount of real time commentary over the
course of the election.
But how do people address blogs and new
media sources (youtube, etc.) as historic documents? As I am "writing
and thinking out loud" via this email, the line between historical
actor and commentator is becoming blurred and represents both
incredible challenges and opportunities for us. My sense is that it is
impossible to treat blogs in a similar way as newspaper articles,
editorials, or memoirs.
Saying how you intend to vote is not simply an expression of how you intend to vote, but rather a component of the public barometer of how the majority intends to vote, which is then used by the media and the blogs to influence everyone else.
October 12, 2008 - October 18, 2008
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