Al Smith speeches

McCain, and

Obama

h/t one of my Clown Buds

great snark

Obama and the Chicago Seven

A sample:

[McCain spokeswoman Jill] Hazelbaker produced computer enhanced enlargements of several key frames from the Zapruder film that she claimed clearly depict a two year old Barack Obama in his stroller beside the man with the umbrella on the grassy knoll in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Hazelbaker says that the enlargements show the sun glinting off of what can only be the telescopic sight of a rifle in the toddler's hands, although some experts not affiliated with either candidate suggest that it could be the sun glinting off a baby bottle.

McCain staffers are also preparing ads that allege that Obama took part in the founding of the Students For a Democratic Society and wrote the first draft of the Port Huron Statement.

When it was pointed out that Obama was less than one year old when the Port Huron statement was written, Hazelbaker replied that it's well-known that Obama is a genius who was born able to read and write and speak in complete sentences.

"He was also born with a full set of teeth," she added. "More proof that he's the Anti-Christ."

h/t Farley at LG&M

the GOP message, the GOP brand, and rat poison

http://www.thenextright.com/josh-kahn/poll-is-our-message-more-effective-without-gop-label

bad as the GOP brand is, now that Dubya has cratered it, there's one thing that's worse. This is a GOP pollster commenting. The poll was designed to determine whether GOP unpopularity is purely "brand" unpopularity, or if there are other problems contributing to GOP unpopularity.

h/t Sully

__________________________

Let’s start with the economy. When voters know what party each message comes from, we lose 37% to 58% and trail among independents by 18%. Ouch. However, when you read both messages without telling voters who they come from, the story gets worse.

Republican voters like the Democrat’s message more than their own party’s message by a large 14% margin when they don’t know which party it comes from. Just as disturbing, numbers among independents drop by another 10%... giving the Democrats a massive 28% advantage. Even our horrifically damaged image is better than our message on the economy. Independents and even Republicans simply like the Democrats’ plan more than ours.

Iraq and trade both follow the exact same pattern. We’re getting smashed on both issues on the partisan test, but when you look at the nonpartisan test where our damaged image isn’t a factor, the numbers get even worse among Independents and Republicans. A few Democrats (and in the case of trade a bunch of Democrats) move our way on the nonpartisan ballot, but Independents actually agree with our messages more when they know the messages came from Republicans.

On taxes, the picture gets more complex. On the partisan text, Independents like the Democrats’ message by significant 14% margin, but Republicans still like our message and give us a resounding 39% advantage. That changes drastically on the nonpartisan test.

When the party’s names are removed, Independents are almost evenly split, giving the Democrats’ message a small 5% advantage. However, Republican voters stampede away from the GOP message. Among Republicans, support for the GOP message on taxes drops by a gargantuan 53% when the party’s names are removed, leaving the Democrats with a 14% advantage. You read that right, on the nonpartisan test, Independents like the GOP message on taxes more than Republicans do and even Independents slightly favor the Democrats.

The takeaway? Our message right now is electoral poison and this isn’t all about “brand.”

Presumably many GOP-leaning voters are "tribal voters" - they don't pay a lot of attention to what the GOP is saying, they just know "GOP good, Dems bad." That's not surprising in itself; as one of my buds says (and as David Brooks said in an otherwise inane op-ed a few weeks ago), "a lot of voters are tribal" (paraphrasing, not a direct quote). That's true for Dems as much as for GOPers, I would guess.

What's way interesting is that the GOP message - presumably in the wake of the problems Dubya has created - is perceived as irrelevant or even toxic to many many voters who would vote GOP if given the GOP tag (aka heuristic that tells them the right way to vote.)

That suggests that some fraction of the GOP bloc(s) might be weaned away from the GOP in an unpolarized campaign.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is in the details, but maybe there's an opportunity here.

Incidentally, this is an interesting counterpart to the recent stories about Rove and his pollster discovering in 2001 that the electorate is so polarized that (Rove concluded) there's no point in campaigning on Dubya's signature "compassionate conservative" message.

Another point: to the extent that the GOP message is the same today as it was in 2000, these results suggest that that GOP message is so unpopular that the only way the GOP can win is by polarization.

Obama and working class voters

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29mellman.html

First, there is no relationship between how candidates perform among any particular group of voters in primaries and how they do with that segment in the general election. In 1992, Bill Clinton lost college-educated voters to Paul Tsongas in the early competitive primaries, but he went on to win that group in November by the largest margin any Democrat ever had. Similarly, John Kerry lost young voters in the competitive primaries in 2004 before going on to win them by a record margin in the general election.

Second, Democrats running for president have been losing white, non-college-educated voters since before Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature. Al Gore and Mr. Kerry each failed to win a majority of this bloc in the general election. With these voters, the size of the losing margin is what matters.

Mr. Gore lost them by 17 percentage points while winning the national popular vote. Mr. Kerry lost them by 23 points and the country by fewer than two and a half points. The last Democrat to win white, non-college voters was Bill Clinton, who carried them by a single point in the three-way races in 1992 and 1996.

By comparison, Mr. Obama is only two percentage points behind John McCain among these voters in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Another recent survey shows him down seven points.

In other words, Mr. Obama is faring better today with the white working class than did either Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry.

social networking writ large

Roger Cohen on social networking, politics, and the Dem primary

Obama's use of the internet for fund-raising and to support grassroots organizing has been generally acknowledged as game-changing.

I don't know much about HRC's campaign organization, but from what I've read, it's largely based on the big-donor and city-machine model that has until recently been considered "best standard practice." I think this is part of Cohen's point.

I think Cohen is right about "blindness", and it's an important point. Social networking in any era scales only to a certain size. Hierarchy is an organizing mechanism that allows scaling beyond physical proximity without the use of technology. Telephone and radio allow scaling to larger and dispersed organizations. The internet allows scaling further.

Barring some surprising reversal, Obama has defeated HRC in the race for the Dem nomination because (among other reasons) he has a better toolkit.

But Cohen doesn't clearly distinguish the tool - in this case social networking - from the uses to which the tool can be put. He recognizes the distinction:

connection is no panacea, or guarantee against violent threats: Al Qaeda uses the Web effectively. But without understanding connectivity, you can no more beat terrorism than win an election.

It's been said that "you need a sharp knife in the kitchen, but you can cut yourself with a sharp knife."

The interesting question is, what will Obama do with the tool when he's president?

it being Memorial Day, perhaps I may comment on this

Greenwald on Kathleen Parker on Obama and bloodlines

______________________________________________________________________

In one of the most repellent columns one will ever read, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker defended Fry's claim that Obama is something other than "a full-blooded American." Advancing an argument that Atrios guest blogger aimai aptly described as "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!," Parker said "we now have a patriot divide" in America that "has nothing to do with a flag lapel pin . . . or even military service." Instead:

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of Josh Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically -- and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century -- there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.

We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants — and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

______________________________________________________________________

I started to ask, "What in hell gives Parker the right to call herself an American?"

Silly me: she was born to it. Perhaps this is an argument for amending the Constitution, but let's take that up some other time.

Instead let me put it this way:

______________________________________________________________________

Dear WaPoop:

In her column Getting Bubba, Kathleen Parker talks about race and bloodlines and values in a way that would have been entirely natural in the segregated South of the 1950s and 1960s. I say this with confidence because I spent the first 22 years of my life in the South. I remember "Colored" bathrooms and drinking fountains.

Have you ever heard the phrase "all men are created equal"? If not, I believe that you will find it in an obscure document known to antiquarians as the American Declaration of Independence.

I believe that the same sentence in this obscure document begins:  "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

It appears that these truths are not self-evident to Kathleen Parker. She has taken it upon herself to dictate to the rest of us standards which in a less euphemistic era would have been called unAmerican.

You have given this John Bircher a platform. May I suggest that this is not a good idea? I believe that Daniel Patrick Moynihan described what you are doing as defining deviancy down.

Kathleen Parker has the right to say whatever she thinks. But perhaps unAmerican white supremacist values are inappropriate for the newspaper of record of the American capital?

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

Fermion T. Clown

______________________________________________________________________

It seems to me that engaging the Kathleen Parkers of the country on the merits of their arguments is a strategeric mistake, because doing so suggests that they and their ideas have substance. They do not. These people are racists. They should be called out for what they are, and ridiculed for their ignorance and dishonesty.

Mannion on "my Obama problem"

another 3-day e-mail adaptation. Sorry, don't remember where I saw it.

one of the points of contention on the clown mailing list was whether Obama is a closet conservative, a closet liberal-progressive, another Huey Long, or just what.

I think Mannion has it right, but as many people (Hilzoy?) have said, "it's a roll of the dice."

http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2008/03/my-obama-proble.html

There are two possible "post-partisan" Americas.

One is the America the Washington Village elders imagine, in which Democrats and Liberals keep their mouths shut and don't spoil any more parties by wondering what the poor people are doing tonight.

The other is one in which torture is simply an evil and there is no liberal or conservative stand on it.

As far as I can tell, Obama has not promised anything that will bring about the first kind. My Obama problem has been that I haven't heard him say it enough times that he plans to bring about the second. But I've heard him say it.

specificity v. temperament and vision

http://firedoglake.com/2008/05/21/finally-barack-obama-gets-specific-about-what-change-is/

One of the criticisms of Obama has been his insufficient specificity (I think McJoan made this statement), although Hilzoy and Kathleen and others have argued that Obama has been quite specific.

I gather that Obama is surmounting Swopa's specificity threshold barrier.

I've tended to look at matters rather differently.

I'm just not much worried about specifics, within reasonable limits.

(Update: Of course the Flying Spaghetti Monster is in the details of, er, what the meaning of "reasonable" is.)

I'm more concerned about temperament and vision. Specifics are worth something, but specifics tend to be ephemeral, because policy specifics will inevitably be bent to conform to political realities.

For me, the fact that Obama decided on community organizing rather than set his sights for (what I read was) a near-certain SCOTUS clerkship says loads more about temperament and progressive instincts than policy specifics.

Put slightly differently [beats dead equine vigorously], temperament and vision give an indication of how a person will act in novel situations, or when his'r'her preferred way forward is blocked. Specifics are static and of limited predictive value.

Once I saw that HRC, Edwards, and Obama seemed to be peas-in-a-pod (w minor differences), I let specifics go and looked for other reasons to vote for or against particular candidates.

My recommendations are free and worth every penny.

Kudlow on rewarding work: insane

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=05&year=2008&base_name=larry_kudlow_pens_the_gop_fall

Ezra writes:

LARRY KUDLOW PENS THE GOP FALL SLOGAN.

We can only hope that the nation's Republican candidates are reading Larry Kudlow this morning:

    This idea of rewarding work instead of wealth is just insane. 

As counter-evidence to my earlier post, the fact of Kudlow's continuing career is the best evidence I know of that conservatives are not only out of ideas, but in fact never had any, and are just experimenting with random sentences that include econo-jargon and references to the stock market.

Ezra doesn't take the cheap shot, but I have no pride, so I will:

Shorter Kudlow: "Obama scares the pee out of the stock markets." 

I'm prepared to be proven wrong, but I've read many times that (not entirely counter-intuitively) the markets do way better under Dem Admins than under GOP Admins.

My Daddy Warbucks/Titan of Industry bud assures me that's not so. I dunno, I'm not convinced that he's aware of the philosophical problems that proof-by-assertion poses.

uh, to put that somewhat less opaquely: he's not strong on using empirical data to prove correlation, his approach is more along the lines of what people have recently taken to calling the Green Lantern school of reality. Me, I'm old-fashioned, I still like the old name: the Tinkerbelle model.

McCain, Obama, & lobbyists

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/23/mccains-ethical-dilemma-c_n_103216.html

My ultra-conservative Catholic bud tells me that McCain's about to launch an attack on Obama's lobbyists.

Tom Edsall argues at the link that if McCain cut loose all the lobbyists attached to his campaign, his would be a very lonely campaign.

Wouldn't a Rove-style "attack from weakness" on Obama's lobbyist connections be a major risk for McCain, given Obama's recent record of punching back?

GOP strategerists mull significant McCain win in November

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10585.html

(h/t Sully)

(quote)
It sounds crazy at first. Amid dire reports about the toxic political environment for Republican candidates and the challenges facing John McCain, many top GOP strategists believe he can defeat Barack Obama — and by a margin exceeding President Bush’s Electoral College victory in 2004.
____________________________________

Sorry, it sounds crazy at 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, too.

I have zero expertise in this area, but it seems to me that there are three ways to look at this:

1) "a miracle happens";
2) "fundamentals";
3) stuff specific to the candidates.

Taking the possibilities in order:

1). Impossible to rule out. My ultra-conservative Catholic bud back in Feb passed along to me a rumor from "a Clinton operative" about Bad Stuff(tm) in Obama's record that would drive him from the race. "He tells me that the GOP knows it too," my bud said.

Hasn't come out yet.

Still could.

uh, but if it's just hanging out there, what is HRC waiting for? She could have gone to Dean back in February and said, "Look, here's what I have, we have reason to believe the GOP has it too, you have to get Obama to drop out of the race for the good of the party."

Is it credible that she wouldn't have done this if she could have? Is it credible after the infighting in her campaign that she has sufficient control over the grunts in the field that one of them wouldn't have leaked it?

2) 8 years of Dubya. 2/3 of the American electorate hating on the Iraq War. Katrina. Lots of closeted GOP gays and pederasts involuntarily liberated from their closets. Economy turning south. MS-01. Right-wing evangelicals left holdin' nuthin' as the most right-wing religiously-oriented Administration in modern American history winds down. The list goes on and on.

3) Obama: scary black dude, Evul Lib'rul, black pastor hating on whites. (stage directions: "all shudder")

.. versus McCain: "Hail the conq'ring hero come; Sound the trumpets, Beat the drum."

(Trivia contest: without consulting Teh Google, what's the reference?)

Seems like this actually might be significant. McCain is a war hero, not that that did Kerry any good, but no one expects the Dems to Swift Boat McCain. And while questions have been raised about the Forrestal incident, AFAICT they're about as content-free as the Swift Boat accusations against Kerry.

But, wait: there's more. McCain: can't control his temper; wrapped around Dubya like a fur around a grande dame; wrapped around the war like slacks on a hooker; called his wife a 4-letter word that will cause Southren belles to faint (Hi, Mom!); dissed Hagee & Parsley, beloved of a non-trivial fraction of the fundie base; wingnut base (Malkin, Our Lady of Donuts) hyperventilating against him; was for illegal immigration before he was against illegal immigration before he was for illegal immigration again; indies for McCain overlap significantly with anti-war indies.. hard to see how that last survives saturation bombing of the airwaves with "Bomb bomb Iran" and Gabriel Garcia McCain's "100 Years of Iran". No obvious way to unite the base without alienating more indies; no obvious way to corner the market on Indies without alienating the base.

Yet more: Obama grassroots organizing, 3M and counting new Dem voters. Outraising McCain by gazillions.

McCain: getting funds from RNC because he isn't raising funds fast enough to offset Obama's fundraising advantage. Cue Dubya, Most Unpopular President Ever(tm) fundraising for McCain.

More: McCain, blowing off vets, siding with Dubya on the GI Bill. Recent polls have shown opinion within the military trending left after decades of trending right. I have read that in 2006, of the vets running for office in the primaries (probably the general as well, but I don't remember), many more were running as Dems than were running as GOPers.

McCain: "older than penicillin" (h/t Sully)

More: McCain seems to be an awful campaigner. I saw mention somewhere (i.e., no link, might not be true) that in states where he actively campaigned, McCain's final vote totals in the primary were uniformly lower than his polls going in. (I think this was before he locked up the nomination, no reason to believe it was true afterwards.) Did I mention "old"? Worse, looks old. Obama articulate, young, blah blah blah.

More generally, the 50%+1 strategery: energize the base blah blah blah. Kerry lost by about 2.5% overall. McCain has pissed off the evangelicals and the nativists. Even some of the Big Bidness types call McCain a liberal. (Yeah, yeah, I know, it beats the hell outa me, too.. but personal experience. I don't seem to have much luck convincing conservative buds and friends-of-buds that voting with Dubya 95% of the time in '07 counts for squat. Or the mid-80 ACU ratings, or the mid-teens ADA ratings. Meta-reference to rivers in Egypt.)

Lately elections have been won on the margins. In this climate, and with these personal attributes, McCain wins by a substantial margin?!?

I'd like to get some of the stuff these GOP strategerists are smoking.. if they're for real, and not just trying to spin away the freight train that's the light at the end of the tunnel, I sure don't see the arguments.

It's widely assumed from the experience of past elections that despite the increasing intra-party hostility between HRC and Obama supporters, the two factions will sing Kumbayah once the nomination is settled and mostly march to the general election unified.

If that assumption is wrong, then all bets are off.

I've seen posts suggesting that HRC might mount an independent campaign if she doesn't get the Dem nod, which seems all but certain now (the nomination, I mean). I just can't see that happening. It's too much risk toher credibility and power base within the party. (Of course the fact that my calculus says "no way" doesn't mean that her calculus will say "no way", but still..)

There's the "working class whites" problem Obama has. Several people have made compelling cases that this is an Appalachia problem, not a general problem, as witness Obama's success in appealing to the demographic in Oregon. An Appalachia problem is still real, but:

1) it's a problem mostly in states that the Dems won't win anyway, which states are not crucial to a Dem victory in the general;

2) the racists are mostly concentrated in the South and Deep South where again, it's unlikely that a Dem will win, nor does a Dem victory depend on winning (all) the Southren states;

3) a Veep like James Webb could bring significant credibility to an Obama ticket in states where the margin is close. Personally, I'd be happier to see Webb stay in the Senate where he is both a leader and a building block towards 60 votes.

So I just don't see where GOP optimism would be coming from...

____________________________________________________

About the Forrestal incident: viral attack e-mails circulated a few months ago - after McCain had won the nomination, IIRC - accusing McCain of causing the incident, and the Navy of covering it up. I did a little armchair research (cue teh Google), and concluded that there was nothing there. Wikipedia has an article about it. But I was curious as to who was circulating the rumors, and why?

I didn't get very far, but as best I can tell, the rumors and blog posts come from the far right. Someone or some group on the Bircher right was trying to gin up a Swift Boat attack against McCain.

Why?

And why did they go quiet?

Might this have been a Rove-style attempt to inoculate McCain against Forrestal charges a la Rather/TANG?

Were the charges just too silly? But then so were the charges against Kerry.

McCain, Obama, and the GI Bill

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/are-we-clear-by-digby-if-john-mccain.html

Digby argues that McCain's temper tantrum might well be a carefully crafted political expression aimed at asserting his alpha male cred and tagging Obama as effeminate..

.. but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Obama should be safe

http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2008/05/obama-should-be-safe.html

I've heard a lot of talk about how Barack Obama might get assassinated because he's black, but I can't understand why. Every single President who has been assassinated in the history of the United States has been a white male. Every. Single. One. In fact, I have it on good authority that every single attempted assassination has been directed against a white male President. If history is any guide, Obama should be safe.

...indeed, with an assassination rate exceeding 9%, President of the United States would appear to be an extraordinarily dangerous job for white men. It would almost be irresponsible to elect someone other than a woman or non-white man.