Friday is looking like the day when Congress will try again to pass a bailout...sorry..rescue package.
Or late Thursday night for the Senate and Friday morning for the House.
All wrong. The Senate will vote tomorrow; the House goes back into session on Thursday -- so don't expect a House vote until late Thursday or Friday.
The Daily Palin... Unleashed?
On feminism, homosexuality, life, abortion, domestic oil supplies, ANWR, her daily reading regimen, how Alaska is a microcosm for America, her faith, feistyness, contraception, evolution, the Morning After pill, Joe Biden and more.
The McCain campaign is quite happy with the 43rd (uh, fourth) installment of Katie Couric's interview....
Hugh Won't Embarrass Sarah. He Promises.
Hugh Hewitt interviews Gov. Sarah Palin. The answers are here. To whet your appetite, here are the questions:
Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even
some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you
surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?
Now Governor, the Gibson and the Couric interview struck many as
sort of pop quizzes designed to embarrass you as opposed to interviews.
Do you share that opinion?
Have you followed the attacks on you, say, via Drudge or the
blogs? Some of them are just made up and out of left field, others are
just mocking. Do you follow those?
Governor, you mentioned the people who are struggling right now.
Have you and your husband, Todd, ever faced tough economic times where
you had to sit around a kitchen table and make tough choices?
Governor, when you say things are tight right now, is that
simply because of Todd being off not working? Or is it because of
extraordinary demands on the fiscal resources of the Palin family?
What's the situation there?
Governor, let's turn to a couple of issues that the MSM's not
going to pick up. You're pro-life, and how much of the virulent
opposition to you on the left do you attribute to your pro-life
position, and maybe even to the birth of, your decision, your and
Todd's decision to have Trig?
Do you think the mainstream media and the left understands your religious faith, Governor Palin?
Governor, let's close with some foreign affairs. It is reported
that you had an Israeli flag in your governor's office. You wore an
Israeli flag pin occasionally. One, is that true? And two, why your
support for Israel?
Last question, Governor. Have you and Todd heard from your son? And how is it on your nerves having your son deployed?
Republicans Are Free Agents Now
The Republican Party is in a near state of complete collapse. There is massive and public infighting. A total lack of confidence in the leadership. No real core idea. A weak national party. A President and White House apparatus with almost no influence whatsoever. A party that might have inadvertently sabotaged a bill it needed to -- and wanted to -- pass.
Yesterday's vote was cathartic in the sense that it clarified for people that John McCain, who still has a solid chance of winning this election, is really not the standard bearer of the Republican Party in function, even if he is associated with the party in brand.
When everyone is a free agent you get anarchy. President Bush is being eaten alive by his "legacy". The House Republicans are desperate for the second coming of a Gingrich-like figure to lead their guerrilla army against whatever the future holds. The Senate GOP is grasping at governance while staring into the abyss of a potential 40 minus seats.
And McCain is attempting to walk between the raindrops with his integrity on the line, and, in the words of one knowledgeable observer, playing out the punchline of, "if you want a friend in this town, get a dog" (wearing lipstick.)
A question for Republicans to answer: How will Sen. McCain government with even slightly larger Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate? Triangulation? Acquiescence? Complete gridlock?
Department Of Silly Accusations
Democrats listen to this clip and hear Sen. John McCain locate Venezuela in the Middle East.
I hear McCain somewhat inarticulately list Venezuela as a country in addition to the Middle East that imports too much oil to the U.S.
Either way: calling this a "gaffe" depends on one's willingness to willfully suspend basic judgment -- do ya really think that McCain's geographical homunculus situates Hugo Chavez in the Middle East? Really? You think McCain really thinks that? Really?
There are credible gaffes, and then there are not credible gaffes. The status of Pakistan as a failed state in 1999... might be one worth thinking about.
This isn't.
Bloomberg's Third Term(inal)
Item: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants a third term and will reportedly seek to change the law to get it done.
Analysis: If Bloomberg were running for the first time, would a technocratic titan of the financial world be just what New Yorkers wanted right now? Now -- there is also the matter of whether voters will stand for a guy whose ego compels him to stay in charge. Apparently, yes -- his approval rating is well above 50% now.
And Bloomberg ain't Rudy...
"This Sucker Could Go Down" Update: Optimism On The Hill
There really is... optimism on Capitol Hill.
Negotiators get the sense that a substantial number of House Democrats and House Republicans are satisfied that they're on the record as having opposed the bailout.
Now that they've expressed themselves, gotten their joints cracked, they seem to be open to voting in favor of a tweaked package.
The economic-minded folks who've e-mailed and called today caution not to be too excited by the Dow's 485 point rise. A dead cat bounce.
Apparently, utility companies had a tough go.... the credit markets are still essentially locked... too much is happening overseas to even begin to contemplate...and more bank failings are right around the corner.
Just Musing...
Gov. Sarah Palin may be a master of the non-answer, of the Bushian empathetic pose, but she has company. Sens. McCain and Obama certainly didn't have an answer to the important question of how their goody bags will necessarily shrink because of the economic crisis....
"This Sucker Could Go Down" Update: The Origin Of the FDIC Idea
To lure recalcitrant Democrats and Republicans and to sooth the nerves of the middle class, both Barack Obama and John McCain seem to have independently arrived at the idea of increasing the FDIC deposit guarantee to $250,000.
As soon as Obama spoke about the idea, House Republicans pounced, claiming that it had come up in negotiations and that Democrats had rejected it.
I can't find a single Democrat privy to the negotiations who remembers any formal proposal to increase the FDIC limit this weekend, although Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) introduced legislation to that effect on 9/22. Republicans insist that the House GOP's lead negotiator, Rep. Roy Blunt, put the FDIC idea into the mix on Saturday night. A review of contemporaneous notes taken by one participant does not include the FDIC idea.
Now -- if Obama had borrowed the FDIC idea from Republicans, he'd be within his rights to claim that doing so was part of an outreach to Republicans -- an attempt to get them on board. The Obama campaign is not claiming that.
What they're pointing to, instead, is Obama's openness to a "menu of options," including thethe House GOP's mortgage insurance option (which made it into the bill), and his willingness to postpone any additional economic stimulus. Most significantly, say Obama aides, was his opposition to giving bankrupcty judges latitutde to adjust mortgages -- a move that angered liberals.
"Obama has consistently been
trying to maximize VOTES, not maximize Democratic votes," a senior campaign official said.
In any event, both Obama and McCain seem to have settled into a bipartisan groove, working, separately, but -- finally -- in the same direction.
"This Sucker Could Go Down" Update: A Democratic Alternative
House Democrats who voted against the bailout are throwing a new bill into the mix. A diverse lot of lawmakers led by Rep. Pete DeFazio want to give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. more latitude to deal with bank failures, just as the FDIC efficiently negotiated the takeovers of Washington Mutual and Wachovia.
It would also suspend "fair value accounting," which could, in theory, stabilize prices and impose a securities tax equal to one fourth of one percent of profits.
The ideas were first introduced by former FDIC chairman William M. Isaac in Friday's Washington Post.
Cosponsors of the legislation include Rep. Rush Holt, Rep. Donna Edwards, Rep. Mazie Hirono, Rep. Marcy Captur and Rep. Elijah Cummings.
Among those making calls on the bill's behalf will be Andrew Stern, president of the country's largest and most powerful labor union, the SEIU. And OpenLeft, a key liberal activist site, is already whipping support for it.
The Bailout: What's Next?
The House won't vote until Thursday at the earliest, and though there's a chance that the Senate could take up the bill on Wednesday, senior Senate aides are doubtful.
A lot will depend on politics and the market.
What do the markets do between now and Thursday? The credit markets, the stock markets, etc.
How do swing/ind voters assess McCain's effort and do they hold him responsible or ineffectual? You can bet that the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign are polling and holding focus groups to assess this.
Do the Dems change their strategy and recraft a bill that would pass without Republican votes?
Will Republicans try to time a breakthrough Thursday night or Friday morning to trump Sarah Palin's performance?
Support For Gov'. "Rescue" Drops
Pew Research, which last week found that 57% of Americans support government intervention to save the economy, finds this week that public support has dropped; only 45% support a "government plan to invest or commit billions to secure financial institutions." 38% say they're opposed; the rest don't know. Independents are the least likely to support it (42%); Republicans are the most likely (49%) Two thirds say they're "angry" about the plan, which independents being the angriest and Republicans being the least angry.
Note that Pew does not poll the term "bailout."
McCain Ad Uses Bill Clinton To Blame Democrats
A new ad by Sen. McCain uses former President Bill Clinton to validate claims that Democrats were responsible for failing to rein in Fannie and Freddie and ipso facto, the whole shebang. The ad "airs nationally." (We'll see.)
Here's what Clinton said last week: "I
think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any
efforts by Republicans in the Congress, or by me when I was President, to put
some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." He's not blaming Democrats entirely, and, indeed, he's said he prefers Barack Obama's solution.
But he's certainly not reading from the Democratic talking points...
Obama, McCain Endorse FDIC Guarantee Expansion
Senators Obama and McCain have arrived at the idea of raising the FDIC deposit insurance limit from $100,000 to $250,000. Obama introduced the idea in a statement this morning, and McCain, in a round-robin series of interviews, made the same suggestion. The FDIC already guarantees retirement accounts up to $250,000.
Of course, the FDIC itself has only about $50b in reserves, so Congress would have to recapitalize the FDIC in the event of a series of bank failures.
New AFL-CIO Mailer On Health Care
Here's the latest mail piece from the AFL-CIO. It hits Sen. McCain on health care, and it'll be sent to more than a million union members across seven states, according to an AFL-CIO spokesperson.
First, here's Barack Obama's most extensive ad to date on his middle class tax cut -- a two minute video featuring, to camera, talking about the economic crisis. It will air nationally and in states.
Atlantic Electoral Map, 9/30
The distribution and categories are based on polling, historical trends, conversations with the campaigns, and the thoughts of smart analysts in those states. MARGINAL TOSS UPS -- states where historical voting patterns seem to be asserting themselves but exogenous factors prevent the electorate from leaning to a particular candidate at this point. TRUE TOSS UPS -- states where historical voting patterns are not asserting themselves AND exogenous factors prevent the electorate from leaning. -----------
Likely Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA (190 electoral votes)
Iowa -- almost off the table; might move it into the solid Obama territory next week.
Minnesota - Republicans report that the NRA's massive mailings and opposition to gun control is helping McCain gaining some traction in Northeast Minnesota's Iron Range and around Duluth, home to union Democrats and hunters.No statewide change in polls - indeed, Obama seems to be opening up a solid lead.
North Carolina: : Seems to be a big suburbanite swing among women in particular; still, the big question in NC is whether there'll be enough African Americans, young voters and Latinos to turn the state blue if the economy remains the top issue and if the Obama machine can turn out the votes. Obama has been here twice in as many weeks. Move from LEAN MCCAIN TO TOSSUP.
Michigan - poll wise, it's opened back up for Obama, but Republicans are contesting it ferociously. Still a tossup, but if Palin mania didn't help there, not sure what can.
Wisconsin - next week, if polls hold, then I might place it into the lean Obama column.
Ben Smith reports that the Obama campaign tried to recruit a rape victim for a television commercial on a now discredited story about forcing women to pay for rape kits.
A Voter Asks A Question, And It's Gotcha Journalism
This journalist asks self-righteously...
How is a pizza joint question about Pakistan from a voter an example of "gotcha journalism" when a ropeline comment by Joe Biden about clean coal gets turned into two ads?
Katie Couric: Over the weekend, Gov. Palin, you said the U.S. should absolutely launch cross-border attacks from Afghanistan into Pakistan to, quote, "stop the terrorists from coming any further in." Now, that's almost the exact position that Barack Obama has taken and that you, Sen. McCain, have criticized as something you do not say out loud. So, Gov. Palin, are you two on the same page on this?
Sarah Palin: We had a great discussion with President Zardari as we talked about what it is that America can and should be doing together to make sure that the terrorists do not cross borders and do not ultimately put themselves in a position of attacking America again or her allies. And we will do what we have to do to secure the United States of America and her allies.
Couric: Is that something you shouldn't say out loud, Sen. McCain?
John McCain: Of course not. But, look, I understand this day and age "gotcha" journalism. Is that a pizza place? In a conversation with someone who you didn't hear ... the question very well, you don't know the context of the conversation. Grab a phrase. Gov. Palin and I agree that you don't announce that you're going to attack another country.
Couric: Are you sorry you said it ...
McCain: ...And the fact ...
Couric: Governor?
McCain: Wait a minute. Before you say, "is she sorry she said it," this was a "gotcha" sound bite that, look ...
Couric: It wasn't a "gotcha." She was talking to a voter.
McCain: No, she was in a conversation with a group of people and talking back and forth. And ...I'll let Gov. Palin speak for herself.
Palin: Well, it ... in fact, you're absolutely right on. In the context, this was a voter, a constituent, hollering out a question from across an area asking, "What are you gonna do about Pakistan? You better have an answer to Pakistan." I said we're gonna do what we have to do to protect the United States of America.
Couric: But you were pretty specific about what you wanted to do, cross-border ...
Palin: Well, as Sen. McCain is suggesting here, also, never would our administration get out there and show our cards to terrorists, in this case, to enemies and let them know what the game plan was, not when that could ultimately adversely affect a plan to keep America secure.
Couric: What did you learn from that experience?
Palin: That this is all about "gotcha" journalism. A lot of it is. But that's okay, too.
A Failure To Communicate (What We Have Here)
John McCain has a fundamental problem. It is that the country blames Republicans for this mess, this enormous, many-tentacled, fundamental economic failure, and McCain hasn't differentiated himself from his party enough. Indeed, as he met with Republicans last Thursday, he seemed to be the leader of their party. With wrong-track numbers hovering above 80 percent, the thumb is so much on the scale that the political universe is warped; no matter what, gravity pulls voters toward Barack Obama. The public will be forgiven for agreeing that Republican ideology created this mess, and Republican ideology prevented Republican House members from supporting a bipartisan consensus. Calling Obama a risky, big government liberal -- that hoary, basic, often effective Republican narrative device -- sounds just plain wacky.
The public basically understands the bailout as the government's being forced to give a lot of money to people who made bad decisions, and, of course the selling of the plan as a "bailout" doomed it from the beginning. Taxpayers are rightfully angry that they're being asked to socialize risk, although its costs will depend on the price at which the Treasury buys and sells the distressed assets, but that's a tough point to understand intuitively.
The failure of the bailout is being interpreted in some quarters as a Jacksonian-style triumph of democracy over the know-better decisions of the technocratic elite -- Main Street's whims over Wall Street's needs. And yet, this isn't really true. When described as a "bailout," the public opposes it. When the principles of the bill are described without using the word "bailout," they support it. So the failure of the bill, was, really, a victory for the inadequate and time-bound vocabulary that our elected leaders use to explain
This was and wasn't a partisan failure. Majority Leader Hoyer and Finance Committee chairman Frank, and Minority Leader Boehner were statesmanlike before the vote. Speaker Pelosi gave a partisan speech at the wrong time; it's indeed possible that it cost her 15 votes. Still, if those Republicans had been of stronger backbones and more nimble minds -- and more mature than Pelosi, who, let's call it, gave a relatively tame, generic partisan speech -- the bill would have passed. Those Republicans were looking for an excuse, and Pelosi gave it to them. It shouldn't matter what Pelosi says; the future of the Republican was at stake. (Newt on Air Force One, anyone?) Pelosi's not responsible for how House Republicans vote.
Neither presidential candidate took a firm position, although one of the candidates riskily suspended his campaign and intervened, without intervening. That intervention failed; he is now blaming his opponent and Nancy Pelosi via a spokesman and bemoaning the gridlock in Washington with his own lips.
Neither candidate really explained the trade-offs to the American people. There was something pernicious, in a way, in both candidates' failure to answer Jim Lehrer's simple question: what will the trade-offs be in January? What, of all the things you've promised, will you not be able to accomplish?
As president, both candidates will rely on the power of the bully pulplit to rally the country, and yet neither candidate has distinguished themselves during the worst financial crisis in the country's recent history.
BTW: A helluva week for Sarah Palin to debate, huh?
A statement from Doug Holtz-Eakin has Sen. John McCain casting his lot with House Republicans who blame Democratic add-ons and Speaker Pelosi's pre-vote speech:
"Barack Obama failed to lead, phoned it in, attacked John McCain, and refused to even say if he supported the final bill.
"Just before the vote, when the outcome was still in doubt, Speaker Pelosi gave a strongly worded partisan speech and poisoned the outcome.
"This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country."
And a senior McCain adviser said that Pelosi's speech "was one of the most reckless acts I've seen from a congressional leader in twenty years on the Hill."
A theory making the rounds of some Republicans is that Pelosi purposely sabotaged the bill to be able to blame House Republicans. Imagine, this theory goes, President Bush's making a partisan speech right before the Patriot Act vote.
"Desperate, petty," a Pelosi aide responded. "She is trying to do the right thing here to pass a bill that a lot of our people hated." A Democratic aide added: "The Republicans were worried about votes but they thought that momentum would carry it and both sides would keep working -- was the way they left it.No Republican asked to pull it.And 140 votes was more than what Pelosi promised Boehner."
On the other hand, maybe House Republicans were looking for an excuse?
According to a McCain campaign source, the Wall Street Journal didn't get the whole story today about Gov. Sarah Palin's debate preparation regime.
Prepping Palin for Thursday's debate will be senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark Wallace. Contrary to reports, campaign manager Rick Davis will not participate.
Wallace has been helping Palin since McCain announced the pick.
The Journal article seemed to suggest some internal blame-assigning, but sources close to the campaign say that McCain does not blame anyone; he just wanted Schmidt to help.
Also: note that Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod will help prepare Sen. Joe Biden for the debate, so it's not unusual for a campaign topper to spend time helping the veep.
McCain's Share of The Blame?
Sen. John McCain and his campaign believe he ought to have gotten credit -- some credit -- for its passage.
McCain, today:
I put my campaign on hold for a couple days last week to fight for a rescue plan that put you and your economic security first. I fought for a plan that protected taxpayers, homeowners, consumers and small business owners.
I went to Washington last week to make sure that the taxpayers of Ohio and across this great country were not left footing the bill for mistakes made on Wall Street and in Washington.
Some people have criticized my decision, but I will never, ever be a president who sits on the sidelines when this country faces a crisis. Some of you may have noticed, but it's not my style to simply "phone it in."
Said Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist, on Meet the Press:
"What Senator McCain was able to do was to help bring all of the parties to the table, including the House Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass this"
So if McCain wanted credit for passage, should he share some of the blame for its defeat?
Two thirds of half Republicans voted for its defeat...after a weekend of telephone call diplomacy from McCain.
Nancy Pelosi may have given a partisan speech, but she was able to get most of her Democrats on board....
House GOP Blames Pelosi
House Republicans are blaming Speaker Nancy Pelosi for quashing bipartisanship sentiment right before the bailout bill vote -- and therefore deserves the knock for its failure.
"We could have gotten here today had it not been for a partisan speech on the floor of the House," Boehner said.
Here's what Pelosi said:
Today, we will act to avert this crisis, but informed by our experience of the past eight years with the failed economic leadership that has left us left capable of meeting the challenges of the future.
We choose a different path. In the new year, with a new Congress and a new president, we will break free with a failed past and take America in a New Direction to a better future."
That Republicans got to the microphones first is a tactical victory for them...
(Basically: Republicans were frightened out of their bipartisan clothing by a floor speech? Does that make sense?)
Where Were You When The World Economy Collapsed?
1:56 pm ET.
Where's Tom Delay when you need 'em?
Who gets blamed for the House Republicans? McCain? Obama? No one?
What's the contingency plan?
What can the government do by itself?
The Bailout Failing; The Dow Plummets
More than 131 House Republucans and 95 House Democrats vote against it.
A rush to cash-in on T-bills...
Dow down nearly 600...
Will Pelosi hold the vote open to get 12 more votes?.
Palin Tweaks Biden
Almost an internal monologue of sorts...where has this Sarah Palin been since the convention?
In Columbus, Ohio:
"So I guess it's my turn now. And I
do look forward to Thursday night, and debating Sen. Joe Biden."
"We're going to talk about those new
ideas."
"I'm looking to meeting him too, I've
never met him before."
"But I've been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in like, second grade."
"I have to admit though, he's a great
debater, and he looks pretty doggone confident, like he's sure he's going to
win."
"But then again, this is same Sen.
Biden who said the other day, that the University of Delaware
would trounce the Ohio State Buckeyes."
He's picking up on a report by Howie Kurtz that CBS is holding "two more responses on tape that will likely prove embarrassing."
I don't know about the content, but what Kurtz is referring to, according to a network insider briefed on the coverage plans, is Palin's answers for Katie Couric's "Vice Presidential Questions" series.
The questions and answers will air on Wednesday and Thursday, the source said.
(Disclosure: I'm a CBS News consultant, although I was not privy to this information before I asked about it.)
New Yorker Has Some Fun
The Great Palin Panic Of 2008
Gov. Sarah Palin has lost control of her public image, several top-level McCain advisers said this weekend, and even a baseline performance in Thursday's debate with Joe Biden may be too late to recover it.
The decision to sequester Palin from the national political press corps was made with the assumption that the afterglow from her convention speech would last; a month later, even some Republicans are beginning to have a less favorable opinion of her.
Her knowledge of policy has seemed at times no more than inch deep, and even admirers have complained that her penchant for returning to talking points sounds artificial. Several times the campaign has had to clean up her remarks for her, such as on Saturday, when she hinted at a view of U.S.-Pakistani relations that was closer to Barack Obama's.
Aides questioned why CBS's Katie Couric was given a second interview with Palin after Palin's responses were ridiculed.
One McCain aide complained that too few surrogates are making the affirmative case for her -- she has defenders, to be sure, but they're sparse and they're generally defending her from specific charges. Aside from a single interview with Sean Hannity, she hasn't appeared on a single talk radio show, hasn't held a single conference call with conservative activists, nor she has participated in a telephone call with conservative bloggers. In turn, these conservatives have largely stopped rallying to her defense.
Internally and to surrogates, senior campaign aides have counseled a "criticize the media" approach, but it has fallen on deaf ears.
A major worry is that if Palin fails to meet expectations Thursday, she'll have no trampoline to fall back on.
Sunday, the campaign sent out a draft version of Palin's schedule that had her prepping for the debate in St. Louis. Campaign sources say that Sen. McCain himself called an audible and suggested that Palin spend her debate prep time in Sedona and bring her family, allowing her to escape some of the intense pressure of the campaign trail.
According to the Wall Street Journal, campaign manager Rick Davis and chief strategist Steve Schmidt, along with McCain aide Brett O'Donnell will work with Mark Wallace, a former Bush campaign official and United Nations diplomat.
Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's chief spokesperson, denied any internal concern. "Governor Palin is a huge asset to our ticket and she's going to do just fine this week." Referring to a Palin public appearance in Central Florida, she said, "60,000 people in FL last week is a pretty good indicator that she's connecting."
Instead of unsheathing Palin, the strategy this week is to attack Joe Biden and try to drive a wedge between him and Obama, another McCain aide said.
Obama's Radical Sensibility Won Him The Debate
The first presidential debate was watched by tens of millions of people who were seeing the candidates discuss their views for the
first time.
Both campaigns know that the most get-able voters at this point are the ones who are highly engaged with the race but tend to base their views on the highest, loudest levels of information.
The people most likely to move the poll
numbers one way or another haven't been tuning into the 30 or so
primary debates we've had; low information voters were the most
relevant audience Friday night.
There was something Pat Buchanan said that night that is at once blindingly obvious and yet very important; Obama's debate performance placed him solidly in the American
political mainstream.
Think of the "bitter" comment, his middle name, the flag pin, the Chicago connections. Low information voters wouldn't be out of line if they had a pretty strong impression of Obama formed by these attributes.
The sober performance and the congeniality
towards McCain worked so well because so many people expected to
see someone dangerous. Obama, in the debate, just did not read as an Ayres-Wright Chicago Elite Radical. Even the throwaway line: "we'd lower
everybody's taxes if we could" quietly undercuts the notion of
old-school liberalism.
It's possible that this weird racial/ideological caricature was
priced into our (campaigns, media) debate expectations, and with Obama coming off as a sensible, middle of the road senator actually did him a
world of good as far as the reassurance of sensibility.
Watching to see if Thune, Cantor, Romney and others come out for
or against the bailout. We know where Gov. Huckabee stands.
Also given what (little) we
know of Palin's politics, if she were a member of the House, wouldn't
she be railing the bailout?
LATimes: Debate Shifts Perceptions Of Obama
Forget the top-line numbers -- note that the poll "indicated that the younger, less-experienced Obama has
made strides since last week in convincing Americans that he can handle
the toughest challenges facing the country, including the economy and
international affairs. Obama was seen as more "presidential" by 46% of the debate watchers, compared with 33% for McCain. The difference is even more pronounced among debate watchers who were
not firmly committed to a candidate: 44% said they believed Obama
looked more presidential, whereas 16% gave McCain the advantage."
Not a single post-debate poll gave the advantage to Sen. McCain. Update: here is one. And, uh Drudge's.
September 27, 2008
Ron Brownstein Scores The Debate
A guest dispatch by Atlantic Media Political Director Ronald Brownstein.
DENVER -- I watched the debate with a group of
undecided or loosely committed voters in Denver, one of the key battlegrounds
in the election. They were mostly young, white and college educated,
which inclined them toward Obama, but most of them were also involved
in finance, which made them very sensitive to taxes and tilted them
toward McCain. As a group, they were under-whelmed by the performances.
They thought Obama seemed a little nervous and circled around his points
too much; several described McCain as "grumpy," or too programmed
-especially when he argued that Obama didn't "understand" one
problem or another. On balance, it didn't seem like the debate moved
them much; several of them (including some former George W. Bush voters)
came in tilting at least slightly toward Obama and left that way. Those
who were the most truly on the fence said it didn't really provide
them any help in climbing off in one direction or the other.
I agreed with the group that the debate
failed to produce a clear story line that would lastingly change voters'
opinions. But I did think it benefited McCain in one respect. The fundamental
tug of war in this election is the competition between Obama and McCain
to frame the choice in the minds of swing voters. McCain wants them
to view their choice largely in personal terms-to ask themselves: which
of these two men has the experience, background and instincts I want
in a president? Obama wants voters to view the choice less in personal
than generic terms-he wants voters to ask which of these two men offers
a direction for the country that I support. McCain Friday night was
more successful than Obama at steering the discussion back to the terrain
that favored him.
The larger point is that nothing that
happened last night is likely to be much remembered in November-or probably
even in October. Mostly, the debate showed that these are both plausible
presidents-though with very different priorities, styles and strengths
which appeal to very different groups of voters. Neither stumbled; neither
soared. I've been wrong about the public reaction to debates too many
times before to predict what (if any) near-term movement in the polls
this will produce. But I will make one prediction: whatever short-term
movement this debate provokes will be superseded by the reaction to
the remaining debates-and to other events within and outside of the
campaigns' control that have yet to occur.
A debater's trick: answering a charge that was not leveled.
But I do not believe that we can make conditions for the opening of
negotiations. We ought, however, to be very clear about the content of
negotiations and work it out with other countries and with our own
government.
That was Dr. Henry Kissinger, interviewed by CNN special correspondent Frank Sesno on the 20th of September.
Dr. Kissinger was referring to negotiations with Iran
Senso asks: negotiation "put at a very high level right out of the box?"
Kissinger:
Initially, yes. And I always believed that the best way
to begin a negotiation is to tell the other side exactly what you have
in mind and what you are -- what the outcome is that you're trying to
achieve so that they have something that they can react to. Now, the permanent members of the Security Council, plus Japan and
Germany, have all said nuclear weapons in Iran are unacceptable.
They've never explained what they mean by this. So if we go into a
negotiation, we ought to have a clear understanding of what is it we're
trying to prevent. What is it going to do if we can't achieve what
we're talking about?
Last night, Sen. Barack Obama asserted that Kissinger endorsed talks with Iran without preconditions. Mr. Obama did not say that Kissinger hoped to begin those talks at a particular level -- although Kissinger, as you can see above, had specified one.
Senator McCain mentioned Henry Kissinger, who's one of his advisers,
who, along with five recent secretaries of state, just said that we
should meet with Iran -- guess what -- without precondition. This is
one of your own advisers.
Now, understand what this means "without preconditions." It doesn't
mean that you invite them over for tea one day. What it means is that
we don't do what we've been doing, which is to say, "Until you agree to
do exactly what we say, we won't have direct contacts with you."
There's a difference between preconditions and preparation. Of course
we've got to do preparations, starting with low-level diplomatic talks,
and it may not work, because Iran is a rogue regime.
Kissinger responded last night to an assertion that Obama had not made:
"Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of
the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level.
My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my
friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do
agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality."
If Kissinger's views on Iran are "entirely compatible" with John McCain's -- an indirect invocation of the transitive principle -- and if Kissinger's September 20th interview with Frank Sesno accurately renders his views, then it seems as if there is very little daylight between Barack Obama and John McCain on how and when to negotiate with Iran.
After twice saying that he would meet with the leaders of rogue countries without preconditions, Obama a year ago took a step back and insisted on "preparation" and on beginning diplomacy below the level of the principles before the presidents could meet.
The only difference appears to be that McCain would insist that Iran do certain things before diplomacy commences, while Kissinger and Obama would NOT insist on any concessions.
Insider's Notes From The Democratic Dial Panels
A Democratic strategist passes along some contemporaneous notes from an instant-response dial group conducted for a major Democratic entity last night.
According to this strategist: whenever Sen. McCain leaned on Obama for being naive and repeated the phrase "Sen. Obama doesn't understand," the tracking lines nosedived.
I suppose that part of the problem was that McCain looked if he had a sharp spur in his shoe, and Obama's performance, whatever you made of it, did not sound naive. So McCain's charges were inconsistent with what viewers were seeing.
Whenever a candidate said "subcommittee," it was a net loser who whomever was saying it, so when McCain attacked, Obama answered and McCain counterpunched, the lines all went down. The lesson: don't use Senate jagon in these debates.
Attention: Republican strategists with access to your side's dial groups, feel free to e-mail me your notes...
Plouffe Grins And Bears It
On a conference call with reporters this morning, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe assiduously tried to lower expectations for the next presidential debate, calling McCain the undisputed master of town hall meetings. He also knocked Sen. McCain's tone: "It's kind of fitting that Sen. McCain did his debate prep in the high
school gym in Oxford yesterday, because it was kind of a sophomoric
approach." He noted that McCain did not challenge Barack Obama on taxes, allowing Obama to score the point cleanly.
Thresholds Crossed In Oxford
I don't think Obama disqualified himself as a potential commander in chief(even if he didn't
reach McCain's level) and I don't think McCain disqualified himself as
a steward of the economy (even if he didn't reach Obama's level.
Question: will Saturday Night Live mock McCain's patronizing attitude toward Obama? Or Obama's manifold agreements with McCain.
The news media dial groups / instant polls seem to give the night to Obama; the partisan professionals seemed to give the debate to their preferred candidate. Very little cross-over.
Hillary Clinton raised Obama's game. A lot of what McCain threw at him he's heard before, and he was ready with quick, concise answers.
McCain arguably flubbed more lines -- mispronouncing Ahmadinejad and Zadari and Pakistan's history -- mistakes that, if Obama made them, would be consequential.
"Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of
the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level.
My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my
friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do
agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality."
CBS News / Knowledge Network Undecideds Give Debate To Obama
40% of uncommitted voters
who watched the debate tonight thought Barack Obama was the winner. 22% thought
John McCain won. 38% saw it as a draw.
68% of these voters think
Obama would make the right decision about the economy. 41% think McCain
would.
49% of these voters think
Obama would make the right decisions about Iraq. 55% think McCain would.
The Rumble In Oxford: First Thoughts:
No memorable moments. Fascinating
body language.
No major
gaffes by either candidates.
No major surprises.
Experience
v. judgment
A good debate for both men.
The big
policy news: McCain floated an across-the-board spending freeze (with a few
exceptions).
McCain did
not filter himself, letting his frustration and contempt for Obama show; he
wouldn't let himself look at the challenger. He seemed to be channeling that
famous Saturday Night Live skit featuring "Michael Dukakis" who looks to the
camera and says, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."Over and over, he adopted the pose of an
impatient school teacher: Obama"doesn't
understand" or Obama "is naïve."
Obama was a
cool cat throughout - although I am reliably informed that GOP spinners are
claiming the exact opposite.
He seemed confident enough to stand up to
McCain's challenges and in a deferential way. He seemed at times to go out of
his way to agree with McCain when agreement was warranted, which the McCain
campaign will surely point out. One impish moment: when Obama said "I have a
bracelet too" after McCain movingly recounted his conversations with the
families of deployed troops. And some of his early pivots back to "hard working
Americans" seemed canned.But generally,
he did not overspeak; he got to his points quickly, and he drew plenty of
direct contrasts with McCain.
As the
candidates debated the bailout, it was McCain, not Obama, who sounded
senatorial, and his obsession with earmarks presupposes an earmark pitchfork
brigade that does not exist.McCain didn't
even defend his tax plan; he simply returned to the comfort zone of earmarks.
Where McCain
was shaky in the first half of the debate, he was on much firmer ground as he
navigated Jim Lehrer'sbroad foreign
policy questions, particularly those questions which did not require McCain to
defend his Iraq war.Obama agreed with
McCain - and said so - almost as much as he disagreed.But he didn't topple or stumble..
Thresholds
are artificial, but both candidates seemed to meet them - although Obama's threshold
was arguably higher.
The press
will probably conclude that McCain did not fundamentally change impressions
tonight.And that Obama held his own.
10:33: McCain: "I don't believe that Sen. Obama has the experience and wrong judgment..." Oh no he didn't: McCain compares Obama to Bush, says he's inflexible.
10:29 Composing thoughts...
10:25: McCain on likelihood of new attack: "I think it's must less than the day after 9/11."
10:23: I'm told that Republicans at the RNC believe that McCain doesn't sound angry...Obama does...and McCain's the one who's acting cool. To each his own.
10:21: GOP sending around YouTube showing Obama saying he agrees with McCain...
10:19: McCain's strong on non-Iraq foreign policy issues.
10:16: For like the ninth time, McCain said of Obama: "He doesn't understand."
10:14: McCain sounds angry and passionate; Obama seems cool.
10:13: Obama and McCain sparring over what Kissinger said; Obama defending himself on preconditions...but haven't we heard this debate before? A dozen times before?
10:11: Obama brings up McCain's comments about PM Zapatero... zings Obama: "I'm not going to set the White House visitors schedule...I don't even have my own seal yet." (Audience can't laugh, so line lays flat."
10:10: Obama cites Bush's overture to Iran...
10:08: Obama: A is not the most powerful person in Iran. So he might not be the most powerful person to talk to. Obama: "Sen. McCain mentioned Henry Kissinger, who is one of his advisers,...who said...we should meet with Iran without preconditions."
10:06: Obama agreeing with McCain on Iran. Playing into McCain's strength? But Obama calls for "tough, direct diplomacy" with Iran.. "this notion that not talking to people punishes them" is "not working." McCain: mispronounces Ahmadinejad... seems fairly angry... blasts Obama for wanting to sit down "without precondition" to person "who espouses the extermination of the state of Israel"... says sitting down with them legitimizes them....
10:04: On Iran: McCain says that if Iran gets nukes, it's an "existential threat" to Israel. Says "We cannot allow a second holocaust." Talks about League of Democracy... lays the case for tough sanctions in Iran...
10:02: McCain is spending the entire foreign policy portion defending the war in Iraq.
10:01: Obama: "I've got a bracelet too." McCain: "You might think that, with that kind of concern, that Sen. Obama would have gone to Afghanistan..." sneers and mentions Obama's subcommittee again....
10:00 A Democrat notes that McCain called new Pakistan PM "Kadari" instead of "Zadari."
9:59: McCain on parents of troops: "We don't want defeat." McCain recalls lessons of VIetnam... "I know how hard it is for an army and a military to cover from that."
9:56: McCain says that "Sen. Obama doesn't understand" quite a bit...seems to be a preplanned line.
9:55: Lesson learned from Hillary? Obama is NOT discursive tonight. He doesn't seem cowed by McCain. And, again, McCain refuses to meet Obama's gaze.
9:54: Obama responds as if McCain is a crazy uncle...Obama justifies taking out terrorists even if Pakistan opposes.. calls it "the right strategy."
9:53: McCain demonstrates a solid understanding of the region here... but isn't very tough on the Pakistanis....
9:52: On Afghanistan, McCain concedes a "mistake" -- assume he means the U.S.'s mistakes. McCain: "If you're going to aim a gun at somebody...you'd better be prepared to pull the trigger." McCain: "I'm not prepared to threaten" Pakistan, like "Obama wants to do." McCain claims Obama says he would "launch military strikes into Pakistan" ... McCain calls for replicating surge strategy in Afghanistan.
9:50: Obama's wearing a flag pin and McCain is not.
9:49: McCain: predicts a wider war "if we adopt Sen. Obama's plan."
9:48: McCain finds it tough to look Obama in the eyes. McCain keeps returning to what Gen. Petraeus says...
9:47: Obama calls for more troops in Afghanistan....
9:45: McCain recalls troop visits...says troops said "let us win:" McCain: "Sen. Obama refuses to acknowledge that we are winning in Iraq.." Obama: "not true, not true." McCain explains the surge strategy... McCain says Obama voted to cut off funds for troops.... Obama: Sen. McCain "opposed funding for troops in legislation that had a timetable because he didn't believe in a timetable...we had a difference on the timetable...we had a legitimate difference on timetable...I understand the difference between tactics and strategy is not whether we are employing a particular approach..the question is, was this wise?"
9:42: McCain notes that Obama opposed the surge...and "still says that he would oppose the surge if he had to decide that again today." Obama smirks... says Obama "didn't go to Iraq for 900 days and never asked for a meeting with Gen. Petraeus. Obama: "I'm very proud of my vice presidential selection, Joe Biden, and he explains...that issues of Afghanistan and Iraq don't go through my committee, but that's inside baseball.." Obama: calls surge a "tactic" designed to "contain the damage of the previous four years of mismanagement of this year...John, you like to pretend that the war started in 2007." Obama lists litany of what McCain got "wrong" on Iraq.
9:40: McCain recounts his history on Iraq. "We will come home with victory and with honor." Says Iraq will be a "stable ally" ...says consequences of defeat would be a "wider war.." .... Obama recounts early opposition to the war....says it was "politically to do so" (it really wasn't, but oh well.) Says Bush and McCain "had a very different judgment." Obama recounts costs of Iraq..."from a strategic national security perspective, Al Q is stronger now than at any time since 2001."
9:39 After 40 minutes on the economy, we turn to Iraq.
9:38: On the economy, can McCain talk about anything else besides spending?
9:37: Obama: "It's your president that presided over this increase in spending...and you voted for almost all for his budget...to stand here for eight years and say you're going to lead on controlling spending....that's kind of hard to swallow."
9:35: Headline of debate so far: McCain Calls For Federal Spending Freeze
9:33: McCain brings up his nuclear power proposal...
9:32: Bringing war to a close, Obama says, is key to a strong economy here at home. First mention of Iraq.
9:31: Lehrer notes that each candidate isn't suggesting any real sacrifices and changes.... Obama notes that his investment in renewable energy might have to be scaled back... Lehrer is incredulous that neither candidates will talk about the major ways in which the financial crisis will effect him...McCain calls for a spending freeze on everything except for defense, veterans affairs.... Obama: "using a hatchet when you need a scalpel"
9:31: Democratic source says Obama answer on energy independence popped in a dial group this source is privy...
9:26: Obama's returning to "The American family" or workers in just about every answer.
9:25: Obama admits that "a range of things are going to have to be delayed" next year. But says that energy and health care must be done regardless....Obama campaign sends out memo:
9:22: Obama: McCain's health care plan taxes health benefits...calls it "not a good deal for the American people..." calls it "an example that the market can solve everything..." McCain: "this is a classic example of walking the walk and talking the talk..." McCain: Obama voted for 2005 energy bill which was "festooned" with breaks for the oil companies.
9:21: Obama: 95% of you will get a tax cut. If you make less than $250K, then you will not see one dime's worth of tax increases. On business taxes: "so many loopholes that have been written into the tax code, often with the support of John McCain." Obama's saying things like "people out there who are working every day..." a lot...
9:19: McCain defends corporate income tax cuts.... and goes back to spending... not sure that earmarks are a big trigger issues these days..
9:19: Obama: "Eliminating earmarks alone is not how to get the middle class back on track..."
9:17: Sen. Obama "suspended those requests after he was running for President of the United States...$932 million in request...maybe to Sen. Obama is not a lot of money..." McCain goes back to corruption...earmarks "corrupts people".... Obama's proposing 800b in new spending, McCain says. "Worst thing we could do in this economic climate is raise taxes." Obama: "I don't know where John is getting his figure..." lists his spending/economic plans...
9:16: McCain, citing Coburn: earmarks are a "gateway drug." McCain campaign sends out memo entitled: "DEBATE FACT #1: A RECORD OF FIGHTING FOR REFORM." McCain's laugh line didn't draw a laugh b/c audience told not to veto. McCain: Obama "has asked for $932 million of earmarked pork barrel spending...I suggest that people go up on the website of Citizens Against Government Waste." Obama: "let's be clear. Earmarks account for $18 billion dollars in last year's budget... Sen. McCain is proposing $300 billion in tax cuts to some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the country..." Obama: CEOs get tax cuts, other Americans don't.
9:13: That 13 minutes was pretty uninformative.
9:12: McCain: "We've got fundamental problems in the system. Main street is paying a penalty..." McCain: "I have a fundamental belief in the goodness and strength of the American worker...we've got to get through these times..." Believes in USA.
9:11: Obama: we need more accountability "but not just in a crisis." Turns back to Bush administration again.... Obama: "ten days ago, John said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong..." Lehrer's trying to get them to fight, but it doesn't come natural to them.
9:10 McCain's tie is bleeding over on my TV
9:08: Obama optimistic about "capacity to come together with a plan." Obama goes right back to Bush admin economic philosophy...McCain says he "hopes" to vote for the plan. McCain: "I also warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.. a lot of us saw this trainwreck coming." McCain brings up Eisenhower's letters on the eve of the Normandy invasion...one of them a letter of resignation for the failures..."someone, we've lost that accountability."
9:05: McCain mentions Sen. Kennedy, says he's in the hospital, but by this point, Kennedy has been released by the hospital. McCain "not feeling too great" about a lot of things...McCain says that in DC, "GOPers and Dems coming together, trying to work out a solution to this fiscal crisis that we're in." ... McCain: "It was the House Republicans that they decided that they would be part of the solution of this problem..." McCain says crisis is not over...sober tone...
9:04: Obama on financial recovery plan...where does he stand? Starts with Axelrodian-connect-with-average-American language... not so much answering the question... just listing his principles...leaving room for McCain to answer simply....links crisis to Bush-McCain economy....
9:03: Who won the handshake? Just kidding..
9:02: Direct exchanges and cross-talk encouraged.
9:01: HD makeup is different than regular make-up....
8:56: Both Obama and McCain campaigns sent out lengthy pre-buttals.
8:54: The Nagourney rule: watch debates on TV just like everybody else. No Oxford, MS, no spin room here.
8:50: Source on status of bailout negotiations: "Staff working thru the nite tonite -- may have principals meeting tomorrow; vote Sunday at earliest -- may be into next week."
8:49 pm ET: One prominent Dem fundraiser e-mails: "I'm worried that Barack gets knocked around and flustered by McCain's simplicity and likely populist message..."
Tonight, John McCain has more to gain and lose. This week, McCain raised the stakes for himself a thousand percent. All those people that didn't realize there was going to be a debate tonight, those 60% of Americans who are tuned in to the economic crisis -- now they'll all want to catch the debate.
Ostensibly, the debate is on his home turf, as most of it will focus on national security, it's the most-watched debate, and he is 3-5 points behind nationally. It looks to me like presidential preferences are hardening and undecideds are making up their minds -- and they're going to Obama because of the economy.
Forget all the political science that says debates are or aren't important. They obviously _can_ be -- and our perception of who won them and who lost them often differs from the public. It wasn't until Saturday Night Live mocked Al Gore's "sighing" that the public began to score Bush higher. What people take away from debates are snapshots: Bush looking at his watch, classical zingers ("there he goes again"), uncomfortable silences, body language.
Some analysts are throwing down various thresholds for each candidates to cross; Obama needs to be a commander in chief and not scary; McCain needs to be vigorous and look like he gets what's going on. I think those thresholds are artificial and not relevant.
What resonates are moments -- the debate is taking place against the backdrop of a crisis, and it is the candidates' responses to the crisis, in real time, that will leave the most impressions.
The stakes are high for Obama here as well, but McCain is the one who's going to be defending his questionable choices of late.
Some notes:
** Expect Obama to play it cool ... although not too cool.
** Expect McCain to appeal to his record of putting "country first" and making the hard choices. There's plenty of fodder for Lehrer to ask McCain to defend Gov. Sarah Palin while he tries to make the case that Obama is untested, has the wrong judgment, and so forth. Obama will probably be gracious and let Palin speak for herself.
** On Iraq, Obama has been pressing the case that the Surge was a laudable tactical victory in a war that's gone on for almost 6 years and was a terrible, costly mistake. McCain will try to bait him into revisiting his judgment.
** Obama might be more aggressive than people expect, having learned from the primaries that the surest way to win a debate is to land a great punch, something he's done only occasionally in the past.
** McCain has spent a lot less time preparing for this debate than Obama owing to McCain's decision to suspend his campaign and return to Washington.
Blunt, Blunter, Bluntest: McCain "Stopped" The Deal?
The McCain campaign does not dispute Rep. Blunt here, but aide points to the phrase "that no House Republican..would have been for..."... and interprets Blunt to mean that McCain helped to bring these points of view to the foreground.
In other words, it was McCain who helped clarify the status of the deal -- that there was no deal -- by recognizing the concerns of House Republicans, without whose support a deal is impossible.
Obama mouth Bill Burton had this to say: "Congressman Blunt just confirmed what's been clear
since John McCain rode into Washington at the eleventh hour - Senator
McCain's political theatrics succeeded only in stopping a bipartisan
deal. During the most serious economic crisis of our time, we don't need
erratic posturing, we need steady leadership to protect American taxpayers and
put our economy back on track."
You be the judge...
NB: Folks on Capitol Hill seem confident that a deal IS in the offing and that it will probably include the basic Paulson bailout + oversight + an "option" that contains the GOP insurance proposals.
New Annenberg finding: "Only 8 percent of survey respondents knew that both McCain and Obama favor closing the base at which alleged enemy fighters are held at Guantanamo Bay. Over 43 percent of respondents incorrectly identify Obama as the sole candidate who favors that position."
Democrats pushing oppo on Rudy Giuliani; claiming his firm will profit from the financial crisis.
Genes And Turnout
This headline from the peer-reviewed Journal of Politics:
After all, two lonely genes are rarely responsible for physical characteristics, much less a complex social behavior like voting. Previously, James Fowler and Christoher Dawes have used twin studies to find the heritability quotient for partisan attachment, always being cautious not to assign causality to particular genes. Indeed, there does appear to be a heritable component to party attachment, although it is not clear whether one's home environment plays an ever bigger role.
Are you a Democrat because your biological parents were Democrats? Because they raised you to be a Democrat? Or because there was something in their genes that made it more likely that they woulld become Democrats in the first place?
The thought process goes like this: the genes influence behavior, and certain behaviors are associated with partisan inclinations. Figuring how which genes influence behavior, which behaviors influence partisanship, the pathaways of causality -- that's hard stuff.
This new study finds that Americans who possess a specific variant of the monoamine oxidase-A gene (MAO-A) were much more likely to have voted in the 2004 election.
Additionally, the 5HTT gene that codes for the seratonin neurotransmitter is implicated in religious attendence, which very much predicts voter turnout. Here, religious attendence is an environmental modifier that associates the gene with a particular behavior.
As the authors put it, "In this article, we hypothesize that people with more transcriptionally efficient alleles of the MAOA and 5HTT genes are more likely to vote."
Transcriptionally efficient? It's easier for specific variants of these genes to transcribe proteins.
Both genes are implicated in modulating anti-social behavior, which itself has correlates to voting. Using regression, they find that by segregating all other factors that influence turnout, Americans with a variant of the MAO-A gene called "high" are 5% more likely to vote. Among regular churchgoers, those who a variant of the 5HTT gene called "long" are 10% more likely to vote.
In other words, Dawes and Fowler contend, after isolating every other known influencer on turnout, humans who possess these gene polymorphisms are more likely to vote.
We're back to some chicken and eggs questions: parents who vote are more likely to have kids who vote.
But what makes parents more likely to vote?
The next step here is to study the effect of monozygotic twins who were reared apart -- something that, unless I read wrong, the study doesn't do. That is -- twin A is raised apart from twin B. if twins with those gene variants are more likely to vote, then the case for heritability is even stronger. (Of course, we cannot isolate the effect of a genetically-influenced environment -- kids with certain innate behaviors change the way their parents rear them, thus entangling their genetic inheritence with what their genes do to their environment.
But more practically: is blood-testing the next trick of microtargeters? Finding out populations where these folks tend to concentrate?
Green: Bailouts Need Both Parties
My colleague Joshua Green invokes recent history to explain why huge bailouts require bipartisanship. Think of Karl Rove and Social Security... and then Ronald Reagan and Social Security. Which worked?
Obama Memo: We're Really, Really Bad At Debates...
And John McCain is really good.
If it's 2pm the day of the debate, it must be an expectations-lowering memo.
The House GOP's Insurance Principles: Would They Work?
House Republicans are hoping that some elements of their not-a-bailout-bailout proposal will make it in to the final draft.
Here's a look at what they want to do, and why it probably won't work.
Certainly, the alternative is politically attractive. One side says: You give banks 700 billions and never get it back. The other side says: We collect insurance premiums and we never pay anything.
The government would sell insurance to companies that buy mortgage-backed securities. The companies would pay a premium.
But trying to price insurance products based on the things underlying the mortgages is very complicated - a whole new valuation process would have to be invented.
I'm not an economist, but most folks who are say that the big problem now is that the markets are locked; there's no liquidity. Asking firms to pay the government does not put more money into the economy.
The Paulson plan basically gives these companies some liquidity in exchange for the bad assets. The GOP principles would give money to the government in exchange for insurance. It's easier to borrow money for investment against treasury bonds; who knows how tough it will be to borrow against the new insurance?
John McCain's decision to suspend his campaign was made in the hopes that politics could be set aside to address our economic crisis.
In response, Americans saw a familiar spectacle in Washington. At a moment of crisis that threatened the economic security of American families, Washington played the blame game rather than work together to find a solution that would avert a collapse of financial markets without squandering hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money to bailout bankers and brokers who bet their fortunes on unsafe lending practices.
Both parties in both houses of Congress and the administration needed to come together to find a solution that would deserve the trust of the American people. And while there were attempts to do that, much of yesterday was spent fighting over who would get the credit for a deal and who would get the blame for failure. There was no deal or offer yesterday that had a majority of support in Congress. There was no deal yesterday that included adequate protections for the taxpayers. It is not enough to cut deals behind closed doors and then try to force it on the rest of Congress -- especially when it amounts to thousands of dollars for every American family.
The difference between Barack Obama and John McCain was apparent during the White House meeting yesterday where Barack Obama's priority was political posturing in his opening monologue defending the package as it stands. John McCain listened to all sides so he could help focus the debate on finding a bipartisan resolution that is in the interest of taxpayers and homeowners. The Democratic interests stood together in opposition to an agreement that would accommodate additional taxpayer protections.
Senator McCain has spent the morning talking to members of the Administration, members of the Senate, and members of the House. He is optimistic that there has been significant progress toward a bipartisan agreement now that there is a framework for all parties to be represented in negotiations, including Representative Blunt as a designated negotiator for House Republicans. The McCain campaign is resuming all activities and the Senator will travel to the debate this afternoon. Following the debate, he will return to Washington to ensure that all voices and interests are represented in the final agreement, especially those of taxpayers and homeowners.
Pollster.com's New Flash Charts
Pollster.com's new charts are really a quantum leap forward in viewing polls online.
They're fully interactive and embeddable.
You can select or limit the polls used to draw trend lines -- and even choose to build a "poll of polls" with the pollsters you trust, while not including those you don't.
Below, I've created a chart from Michigan, showing data from live interview surveys only, filtering out the IVR and internet surveys.
Answering Your Bailout Questions: Why Can't The Democrats Just Do This By Themselves?
Question: If only House Republicans are against the bailout, then why can't Pelosi and Reid just ram it through?
Answer: Because it's not that simple. For one thing, a lot of House Dems aren't thrilled with the bailout, and they need political cover from Republicans. It's an iron-clad rule of legislative politics: something this big and this risky can't go through without bipartisan support -- which is basically bypartisan CYA. So the more House Republicans make noise, the more nervous House Democrats will be.
FDIC, The Banks, And WaMU
Item: banks can't loan to each other...money rates are surging. see the picture above. How can banks function with those rates? (They can't.)
Item: Chinese banks are no longer allowed to lend in overnight markets to US banks as of yesterday The Chinese government denies this.
Item: WaMU fails; is taken over by JP. Morgan
Item: if another bank fails, will the FDIC be able to secure all its deposits? (It has $50b. Bank balance sheets are usually a lot greater.)
Item: where will Congress get $200b to keep the FDIC afloat if more banks fail?
Debate Odds For McCain...
50/50 right now.
McCain's Toughest Day Yet
The CW in Washington this morning is that McCain's suggestion for the grand, high-stakes summit meeting
was the very thing that caused all of Washington to explode.
True, there was no "deal" -- House Republicans were always balking and Speaker Pelosi really wanted House Republicans to pair with House Democrats.
But McCain's presence in Washington gave voice to House Republicans, deliberately, if Minority Leader Boehner was somehow in cahoots with McCain. That's not likely -- the House caucus never trusted McCain and White House credibility among the GOP
is ZERO. Indeed, maybe McCain feels privately duped by Boehner.
House Republicans did their best last night to bring McCain to their side, even though McCain did not intend to endorse any set of principles. Senate Republicans feel slightly emboldened now, in what became sort of a domino effect.
McCain needs to find a way to get House Republicans to buy into a deal.
If not -- and if there's a market sell-off -- McCain's going to have a tough, tough weekend. Never have the downside risks been so clear.
CNBC v. House Republicans
Watching NBC Squawk Box in the morning, the anchors are absolutely tearing into Republicans and Sen. Shelby right now. They keep asking, "Where have you guys (House
Republican's) been during the last 10 days? Why now?"
September 25, 2008
What Happened In The Cabinet Room...
Though Sen. Chris Dodd implied that Sen. McCain sandbagged the rest of the negotiators by bringing up alternative proposals, McCain himself did not bring up those proposals, according to four independent sources briefed by four different principals inside the meeting, including two Republicans and two Democrats.
"McCain has not attacked the Paulson deal," said a third Republican who was briefed by McCain direclty. "Unlike the [Democrats] in the [White House]
meeting, he didn't raise his voice or cause a ruckus. He is urging all
sides to come together."
Republicans like John Boehner brought up the concerns of House GOPers and McCain acknowledged hearing about their concerns. And McCain, and staffers, did seek to gauge the level of support of the GOP working group's white paper. The Democrats were left with the impression that McCain endorsed the GOP efforts, but they concede that he did not raise them directly.
The fact is that Boehner doesn't have 100 votes from his conference -- 100 votes that Nancy Pelosi really wants. And that's not McCain's fault.
But Boehner and the White House -- and McCain -- if they want to get something passed -- do have the responsibility to persuade these Republicans to support the bailout .
After all, if not to get these recalcitrant Republicans on board, why did McCain go to Washington in the first place?
Palin On Foreign Policy, Nation Building, And Why She Disagrees With Kissinger
Saving The Bailout
I'll let this be the final word from someone in the know:
"Paulson and the White House need to talk to House Republicans to get them on
board."
Bailout Agreement Unraveling?
During the White House meeting, it appears that Sen. John McCain had an agenda. He brought up alternative proposals, surprising and angering Democrats. He did not, according to someone briefed on the meeting, provide specifics.
One the proposals -- favored by House Republicans -- would relax regulation and temporarily get rid of
certain taxes in order to lure private industry into the market for
these distressed assets.
That approach has been rejected by Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans and, to this point, the White House. During the meeting, according to someone briefed on it, Sec. Henry Paulson told those assembled that the approach was not workable.
Before the White House meeting, Democrats and Senate Republicans were on track to get legislation to the floor by tomorrow. Democrats say that, at best, they hope for half of Republicans in the House to go along. At worst, the vote in the House becomes partisan and then Senate Republicans get shaky and then...
As of 6:30, as the Corner notes, Fox's Carl Cameron notes that the mood on Capitol Hill is "remarkably sour."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement that "it's clear that more progress is needed and
we must continue to work together quickly to protect our economy."
McCain Sounding Out Support For Alternative Bills?
Two Congressional sources say that Sen. McCain and his staff have sounded out moderate Democrats and conservative Republicans to see whether they support the conservative Republican Study Committee's alternative bailout bill.
And Sen. Chris Dodd said on CNN that McCain, in their meeting at the White House, brought up House GOP "Rescue" principles that Reps. Eric Cantor. Rep. Jeb Hensarling and Rep. Paul Ryan are circulating.
Dodd suggested that Democrats did not expect McCain to mention any new poposals.
The RSC The GOP Working group opposes a tax-payer bailout, preferring that it be
privately funded. The GOP Working group would suspend the capital gains tax for two
years to encourage business with mortgage-backed debt to sell their underperforming portfolios and
provide tax incentives for companies to buy them. Read more: Economic Rescue Principles.pdf
"We are not pushing any specific proposal," Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's chief spokesperson, said after the meeting. "We are
dedicated to brokering a quality agreement on a bipartisan basis"
McCain told news anchors tonight that he believes that there's been progress made toward an agreement, but he did not specify who was agreeing with whom.
After McCain and Obama left the White House, a White House spokesperson said in a statement that "members of the Administration and the Congressional leaders pledged to continue working
together to finalize a bill that will address concerns and solve the problem as
soon as possible."
House Republicans are likely to vote en masse against the Treasury bill as currently constituted.
Just hours after Sen. John McCain made a surprise
announcement Wednesday that he was temporarily suspending his
presidential campaign to help work out a bipartisan deal in Congress on
the financial crisis, his campaign manager Rick Davis dined with about a dozen top New York-based fundraisers at the chic 21 Club in Manhattan.
McCain On The Attack
CBS and the New York Times asked registered voters how they perceive the campaigns are spending their time:
Now -- out of that sample, uncommitted voters give John McCain a bit of breather -- 43% say he's attacking and 43% say he's explaining.
The Democratic/Bush Bailout?
A senior Democratic aide says that Democrats remain concerned that McCain is going demagogue the bailout as part of an effort to distance himself from Bush and to bring himself closer to the country's populist center. The argument from McCain could be that it bails out Wall Street without requiring any upfront costs.
But here's another possibility, from a senior Republican staffer on the Hill: McCain likes the bill, but if he gets behind it, it becomes HIS plan, and then the Democrats would go South.
So if he can be in the mix without making a firm commitment, if a deal is reached, he can swoop in and say that he got 'er done.
The principal in all this appears to be Minority Leader John Boehner, who, after meeting with McCain today, clucked a little bit about the prospects for the bill; but Boehner was just telling the truth there has never been much support for this among House Republicans.
The Dems' theory is that with Boehner pushing back
and suggesting that a deal is not yet done, McCain save the
day with the...well... fabricated.... meeting at the White House.?
On the other hand, maybe Democrats are trying to fast-track a bill that most Republicans aren't inclined to support. If the bill becomes the Democratic/Bush bailout, what would McCain do then?.
Just Asking...
Wasn't Mitt Romney the go-to surrogate for McCain on economic issues
all throughout summer?
Where has he gone to?
(Answer: he is campaigning for McCain in Michigan today.)
Updated -- Ostensibly, this goes to the Obama campaign, for pointing out that Sen. John McCain is taking along his campaign's chief economic policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, to the White House.
DHE, as they call him inside the McCain campaign, knows as much about the economy as anyone on McCain's Senate staff.
He happens to get a paycheck from the campaign, as McCain has been running for president recently. The campaign is "suspended," although we know it's a partial suspension of some activities designed to look like a full-scale suspension -- should DHE stay home and surf Facebook?
So there's wrong about his accompanying McCain to the White House? McCain's bringing his best policy guy to a meeting, and he gets knocked for it? Only in the sense that McCain's suspension was really never a true suspension...but then again, we kind of knew it wasn't.
It's kind of irrelevant.
Update: the Obama campaign says that they were told NOT to bring campaign staff to the White House.
So -- there's a double standard here.
I guess it's not a cheap shot. Just irrelevant.
Just as, it turns, the White House meeting might be, since Congressional leaders and the White House have already reached an agreement on principles, and neither Barack Obama nor John McCain had anything to do with it.
Another Suspension
Being Close To Russian Entails......
The next installment in Katie Couric's interview with Gov. Sarah Palin.
Couric And Palin Part II
Tonight, watch for Gov. Palin's answers about foreign policy.
Stay tuned....
Midweek Move: North Carolina Is A Tossup
I'm moving North Carolina from "lean McCain" to tossup because public and private polls show a surge of support there for Sen. Obama. (I've even seen a private poll showing Obama narrowly ahead.)
Next week, I might move Minnesota from "Lean Obama" to tossup. That's TBD.
Here's the map as of 9/25:
Likely Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA (190 electoral votes)
Today is the first day of Sen. Ted Stevens' trial, as has
been written ad nauseam. If it sticks to the schedule they've laid out,
it will finish in roughly four weeks. But here's something no one has
thought, or at least written, about....what does it mean for the Republican
Party's prospects (presidential race to some extent, but mostly
Congressional) if the longest-serving Republican Senator in history - who
also hails from the same state as the vice presidential nominee - is
convicted of corruption charges a week before the election?
Scrambling Toward A Compromise
John McCain's vow to return to Washington and get this mess settled out has lit a fire under the behinds of Democratic negotiators who worry that his presence will suspend their negotiations, give House Republicans a figure to rally around in opposition to a compromise, and generally weaken their negotiation position.
That's why they're scrambling to have a compromise in place before the 4:00 pm ET meeting with President Bush at the White House. If they do, then they only need worry about McCain's claiming credit for the sense of urgency, which would be inaccurate but hard to disprove. The fact is that, by 2pm yesterday, the House and Senate Democrats had settled their most important differences, the White House had caved on CEO pays, and the two sides were coming close to dealing with the bailout's oversight mechanism, its posture toward homeowners, and whether taxpayers would get ownership stakes in taken-over companies. Then McCain airdrops in --well, he's not actually in DC yet, so it was a virtual airdrop -- and it compresses the timeline even more.
My colleague Nora McAvalnah tells me that sources close to Senate Democratic leadership
now fear that McCain's true motivation for calling off his campaign and coming back to DC is simply to cast a "no" vote against the bailout, despite his private statements to the contrary. And it's a smart maneuver: nothing says "maverick," like voting against Bush and
standing with the American public, who remain very wary of the proposal.
Half-Suspended?
The most popular half of the McCain-Palin ticket plans a Thursday afternoon rally near the Philadelphia International Airport, according to a Philadelphia TV station.
The McCain campaign says that the rally won't happen.
September 24, 2008
Another Way To Look At It: "Obama's Katrina Moment"
Today was Obama's Katrina moment and an example of great leadership by John McCain. This contrast was telling and will matter.
Well, it's... a view.
I'm fairly skeptical, as should be obvious from the posts today, that Americans will embrace the McCain campaign's view of the world, but I've been wrong before, and I might well be wrong again.
Letterman's Rant...
About 7:05 in... Mr.
On The Cutting Room Floor...
The Obama campaign proposed the following five points...joint principles, along with a joint statement.
The McCain campaign did not want to include them, and so the statement was sent out without these bullet points:
First, there must be oversight. We should not hand
over a blank check to the discretion of one man. We support an independent,
bipartisan board to ensure accountability and complete transparency.
Second, we need to protect taxpayers. There should
be a path for taxpayers to recover their money, and to turn a profit if Wall
Street prospers.
Third, no Wall Street executive should profit from
taxpayer dollars. This plan cannot be a welfare program for CEOs whose greed
and irresponsibility has contributed to this crisis.
Fourth, we must help families who are struggling
to stay in their homes. We cannot bail out Wall Street without helping millions
of families facing foreclosure on Main Street.
Fifth, we both agree that this financial rescue
package should move on its own without any earmarks or other measures. We have
different views about the need for other action, but this must be a clean bill.
This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the
country. We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. This is not a Democratic
problem or a Republican problem - this is an American problem. Now, we must
find an American solutions.
The Joint Statement
Here's the joint statement. Obama spokesman Bill Burton and McCain communications director Jill Hazelbaker worked out the language and sent it to their bosses for approval.
Joint Statement of Senator Barack Obama and Senator
John McCain
"The
American people are facing a moment of economic crisis. No matter how this began,
we all have a responsibility to work through it and restore confidence in our
economy. The jobs, savings, and prosperity of the American people are at stake.
"Now
is a time to come together - Democrats and Republicans - in a spirit of
cooperation for the sake of the American people. The plan that has been
submitted to Congress by the Bush Administration is flawed, but the effort to
protect the American economy must not fail.
This
is a time to rise above politics for the good of the country. We cannot risk an
economic catastrophe. Now is our chance to come together to prove that
Washington is once again capable of leading this country."
Friday's Debate Will Focus In Part On The Economy
It has to, right?
How could Jim Lehrer, a newsman, not ask about the economy?
Well, he will.
A senior Obama adviser says that the CPD has told both campaigns that there will be questions about the economic crisis during Friday's debate.
They were told this last week...
Bush Invites, Obama Accepts, White House Invite
Bush and McCain are tag-teaming...
Here's a statement from the Obama campaign:
"A few moments ago, President Bush called Senator
Obama and asked him to attend a meeting in Washington tomorrow, which he agreed
to do. Senator Obama has been working all week with leaders in Congress,
Secretary Paulsen, and Chairman Bernanke to improve this proposal, and he has
said that he will continue to work in a bipartisan spirit and do whatever is
necessary to come up with a final solution. He strongly believes the
debate should go forward on Friday so that the American people can hear from
their next President about how he will lead America forward at this defining
moment for our country.
McCain's Bottom Line: No Deal = No Debate
A senior campaign official says that McCain will NOT
debate -- no matter what -- if Congress hasn't reached an agreement on
a bailout package.
The aide said that Obama's refusal to suspend his campaign will have no bearing on McCain's decision to attend the debate.
The aide did not know whether Gov. Palin would attend Oct. 2's vice presidential debate if Congress, by that point, still hasn't reached a deal.
Another aide said: "The VP debate is days off. We're focused on getting a deal and getting to the debate on Friday."
Suspending A Campaign Is...What, Exactly?
It's not easy to pull down an entire country's worth of television advertising, so you'll certainly be seeing reports of TV ads still on the air... for at least 24 hours.
Will the campaign shut down its phone banking?
Will volunteers be told not to show up for work?
Will payroll be suspended?
The campaign presumably has polls in the field...will it suspend the field work?
Waiting For The World To Change
The political cognoscenti seems to regard McCain's campaign suspension as a transparent political ploy.
The media filter, from which the campaign cannot completely bypass, is skeptical.
Before we pounce upon this potentially fatal error, though, we might want to wait and see how the public responds.
Perhaps they will accept McCain's actions on face value.
A Messaging Irony
Last week, Sen. McCain said the fundamentals of the economy were strong.
To Katie Couric, he said that the country faces its worst crisis since World War II.
COURIC: You've said, quote, "John McCain will reform the way Wall
Street does business." Other than supporting stricter regulations of
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more example of
his leading the charge for more oversight?
PALIN: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings
two years ago about Fannie and Freddie--that, that's paramount. That's more
than a heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.
COURIC: But he's been in Congress for 26 years. He's been chairman of
the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less
regulation, not more.
PALIN: He's also known as the maverick though. Taking shots from his
own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get
people to understand what he's been talking about--the need to reform
government.
COURIC: I'm just going to ask you one more time, not to belabor the
point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation?
PALIN: I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to you.
This should have been an easy question for Palin to answer, right?
The McCain View: They Asked For Us
A McCain aide pushes back against the notion that this was a pure riverboat gamble by McCain.
Yesterday, the aide contends, Democrats basically said that unless McCain owned the package they were going to put together, then it would fail.
The package can't fail; hence McCain needs to be in Washington.
That's a fair point.
Sen. Harry Reid is out with a statement saying that he actually doesn't want the presidential candidates to return to Washington a day after Democrats basically begged for one of them to help.
So Democrats, taking advantage of the pressure McCain was under, would have forced to him to own the bill... and now, McCain is doing it on his own terms.
The trick -- the gamble -- is whether McCain, in suspending his campaign and advertising, took it a step too far, and tried to build a large bridge to cover a narrow chasm.
Now Democrats are in the position of saying... we don't want your help.
So -- either McCain wiggled his way out of the box the Democrats put him in.
Or the lid just shut.
We'll know soon enough.
Suspended v. Not Suspended
Just to keep this straight:
Suspended: McCain campaign McCain campaign advertisements David Letterman Plaxico
Not suspended: McCain rapid response operation Katie Couric Bono Educating Sarah Palin The debate (so far)
(Note: the meeting with Lady de Rothschild took place before the suspension, so it doesn't count.)
Returning To Washington
The one way to make the bailout negotiations MORE political is to have a major party presidential candidate try to bigfoot his way into the debate under the guide of not being political.
The problem is that McCain's job now is not leader. It's candidate. And Democrats in Washington -- the majority party -- view him as a candidate, not as a senator.
Impulse Behind McCain's Action
A GOP consultant close to the campaign says that McCain realized that
he must to support a bailout package, that Republicans will be blamed if
one fails, and that he -- McCain -- has to OWN the solution and put his
leadership brand out front.
Letterman Blisters McCain
Drudge has the rest, but check out this really harsh line:
Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, "You don't suspend your
campaign. This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero
behaves." And he joked: "I think someone's putting something in his
metamucil."
What Is Politics?
This is the time when politics matters the most, not the least.
When the philosophical differences that each party organizes around are put to the test of reality.
When conflict builds consensus.
When the public craves answers and debate from their politicians.
When the stakes of the presidential election could not be more acute.
Comparative advantage: the best thing the presidential candidates can do now is to practice their politics honestly, not to abandon politics altogether -- itself, of course, a political move.
Suspending your campaign basically says: all that over the past sixteen months? It wasn't important. Ignore what I said or did.
Too late.
The tough thing here for McCain is that nobody in Washington asked him to come back; nobody seems to need him to come back; and that Democrats simply do not trust John McCain's motives.
Why Wal-Mart Shoppers Support McCain Over 'Bam
(Sorry, just been reading the New York Post.)
A reader writes:
I saw you wrote this earlier today on the NPR Poll: "The
poll, taken between 9/18 and 9/20, also shows that Wal-Mart shoppers
prefer John McCain, which would seem to contradict data showing that
voters making less than $100,000 a year support Barack Obama."
I
believe the simple explanation for this is demographics. There are no
Wal-Marts in major metropolitan areas, and if they are, they are on the
edges. And if the target of your poll, those who shop at Wal-Mart,
excludes most people in metropolitan areas, the democrat is never going
to lead that matchup. It's like polling people who use subways and
being surprised that McCain is trailing. They should stick to just
looking at actual income levels.
Just Asking...
So will cell-only households cancel out a Bradley effect if one exists?
As a reader notes: "If you
assume each is responsible for a 1-2 point differential, then maybe
it's a wash."
A Kuhnian Revolution About To Take Place In Polling?
Those missing cell phone-only respondents....make a difference. When pollsters first noticed that large numbers of young Americans were ditching their landlines in favor of cells, they took comfort in surveys showing that there was little to no difference in how the two groups responded to surveys. Now, a statistically significant difference has been detected, courtesy of the Pew Research Center. As Pollster.com's Mark Blumenthal notes, Pew's researchers concluded that in three surveys from the summer, "including cell phone interviews resulted in slightly more support for
Obama and slightly less for McCain, a consistent difference of
two-to-three points in the margin."
As one would suspect, cell phone users tend to be young -- under 30 -- and they consistently give Barack Obama more than 55% of their vote in these surveys.
Pew's researchers go so far as to conclude that traditional weighting measures are suspect because of the differences between landline voters under 30 and cell phone voters under 30. The differences extend to party identification; the gap between Democrats and Republicans among cell phone-only users was nearly three to one in a recent Pew survey.
So what's next?
Gallup has been sampling a cell-phone only population in conjunction with its landline surveys; see more here.
If Pew's research is correct, then pollsters everywhere will have to adjust their weighting math and rethink how they think about the intersection of technology and public opinion.
Bailout Questions
So where did the $700 billion number come from?
Sec. Paulson told congress
yesterday that the plan was to spend roughly 50 billion a month,
Sen. Schumer asked: why
not $150 billion then, and let the next administration do a
re-evaluation in January? No real answer.
So, why $700 billion? Where is it all going? And why do they need it all at once? And how do they know how much it'll cost without knowing what criteria they're going to use to buy firms?
And what's to prevent Paulson from engineering the bailout, and then, once he leaves office, taking the helm of one of these companies as it transitions back to the private sector?
And did the administration really have a bailout proposal stashed away for weeks without informing Congress?
McCain Pollsters Buck Up The Troops, And Other Polling News
McCain pollster Bill McInturff and chief of strategy Sarah Simmons want you to know that they're convinced that the ABC News Washington Post poll out this morning is an outlier and "not at all indicative" of what the campaign sees in in the states.
McInturff told reporters this morning that he considered the poll problematic because party identification trends were not factored in the results, undecided voters were pushed to choose a candidate, and the 16 point party identification gap was much too big. McInturff said that McCain will win of the party ID gap is reduced to four points or so -- today, he estimates that Republicans are down six to eight points.
But so does ABC News. Their measure of unleaned -- as in -- non-pushed -- party identification among their likely voter sample was 37% for Democrats and 30% for Republicans -- a spread of seven points.
--------
A National Public Radio survey of 14 battleground states on the eve of the debate gives McCain a narrow, within-the-margin of error lead over Obama, reversing a slight Obama lead last month. The poll, taken between 9/18 and 9/20, also shows that Wal-Mart shoppers prefer John McCain, which would seem to contradict data showing that voters making less than $100,000 a year support Barack Obama. The poll does find large gains for Obama on attributes like authenticity and honesty and gives him a 9 point advantage on economy handling.
---------
Marist gives Obama a double-digit lead in Iowa and a slight lead in New Hampshire.
---------
And the Diageo-Hotline tracking poll suggests that Obama has regained a lead among white women....
Why Hasn't The Times Covered David Axelrod?
The McCain campaign:
The New York Times has never published a single investigative
piece, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship
between Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod, his consulting
and lobbying clients, and Senator Obama.
False. They did, in fact, publish a single investigative piece, just one.
The paper examined Axelrod's ties to Exelon in an investigative article about Obama and the nuclear industry.
As I recall, the Times has also looked closely at Obama's relationship with the Illinois coal industry, among others.
Here is a point that the McCain campaign did not make: journalists tend to cover Republican consultants' ties to industry and never Democratic consultants' ties to labor unions.
It's a double standard, maybe an appropriate one, as labor and corporations have different purposes to play in our economy. And maybe the ties of McCain associates are more germane to the issues at stake this year.
But it's worth noticing all the same.
GSEgoguery And A Legitimate Question
Someone's out to get Rick Davis, and it ain't the New York Times. The Times was but one of three news entities who reported the same story this morning: Freddie Mac paid $15,000 a month to Davis Manafort until August of this year.
In a late-night missive written in Schmidt Gothic Bold, the McCain campaign denied what the stories did not allege -- namely, that Davis personally profited from Freddie Mac and therefore had a direct financial conflict of interest in helping McCain develop policy.
Davis retains a stake in his firm, but it's not clear whether he'll benefit financially. Though he certainly has an ego interest in keeping the firm alive, the story's not about profit. It's about influence buying. Newsweek goes the furthest, here: did Freddie Mac pay the firm because Davis was associated with John McCain and, at the time the payments began, McCain was the Republican frontrunner? Did Davis somehow sanction this arrangement? This is a legitimate question.
Davis's denial leaves open questions. Bashing the New York Times is not an answer.
Now -- another truth is that few Democrats and few Republicans expressed concern about Fannie and Freddie until alleged improprieties became a matter of public record. Ironically, I remember having a conversation with an associate of Karl Rove's, who, in 2002, told me that Rove was concerned about the GSEs becoming overleveraged. (!) In any event, associates of John McCain and Barack Obama profited from the GSEs and encouraged their growth, as did almost anyone with an interest in increasing homeownership in the country.
But the story's not about GSEs per se -- it's about whether Freddie put Davis's firm on retainer because Davis was allied with McCain.
A Numbskull's Guide To The Financial Crisis
First in a series of posts.
I play the numbskull and Megan McCardle patiently answers my questions.
First question to Megan:
The government says
that the credit markets are "locked." What does that mean?
Megan responds:
The reason markets are locked is that everyone is scared. When
financial markets turn scary, the first thing people want to do is get
their hands on as much cash as possible. Ordinary investors want
cash. Unsurprisingly, the institutions who invest their assets also
want cash, in case any of those folks ask for their money back. And
the money managers who institutions invest with, like big money market
and mutual funds, also want cash, to give to the institutions when they
pull out.
One or two people wanting to liquidate their investments and turn
them into cash is not a problem; in ordinary times, the inflow of
investors makes up for the outflow. These are not ordinary times.
When everyone wants to liquidate their investments, no one can. Money
managers are sitting on big piles of perfectly sound securities that
they cannot sell simply because everyone's trying to hoard their supply
of cash and treasury bills (which the market regards as functionally
equivalent to cash in the short term). Government debt is in such high
demand from institutions that are required to invest in ultra-safe
securities that at one point, investors seemed willing to pay the
government to take their money. Everything else, no matter how likely
it is to pay off, is just so much paper.
This feeds on itself: people won't buy because they don't know
whether they can sell in an emergency. So they're waiting for other
people to come back in the market and start buying again. Of course,
all the other people are waiting for the same thing. Everyone wants to
go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
It's hard to see a way out of this without some form of
intervention, because it's a problem of collective action. If everyone
wasn't trying to hoard cash, no one would need to. Either private
enterprise or the government need to find some way to cut through the
gordian knot and open up the markets again.
Independents Lean To Obama On Economy
By nearly 14 points, independents trust Barack Obama to handle the economy better than John McCain, according to Pew's latest study. Check it out here.
57% favor "the government's potentially investing billions to try and keep financial markets and institutions secure," which is a suspiciously anodyne way of describing the Bernanke/Paulson "bailout." If Pew had referred to the plan in the political vernacular, here's betting that fewer Americans would support it. Language matters!
Pew finds extremely high interest in economic issues --56% of folks say they're following along -- but very low comprehension of the crisis -- just 24% say they understand it well.
Google Power!
The folks at Google have anointed me a Power Reader in politics, which means that there's yet another way to keep tabs on my brain.
The concept is simple: I read an article I like or disagree with, I post it, and I comment on it. Sort of a sidebar blog.
Other power readers include Mike Allen, Ruth Marcus, John Dickerson, Mark Halperin, Chuck DeFeo, Arianna Huffington, John Meacham and Patrick Ruffini.
And no, we don't get free Androids.
ABC/Post Poll Suggests Gains For Obama
A majority of Americans now say that the economy is the country's most pressing problem, and Barack Obama has opened up a double-digit advantage over John McCain on the issue, according to a new Washington Post / ABC News poll.
Voters, by 14 points more than McCain, trust Obama to handle the economy; his messaging that McCain is "out of touch" is bearing results, as 57% of Americans think that Obama better understands the complexities of the system. And when asked an open ended question about who'd best handle a crisis of any sort, half pick Obama, up significantly.
The poll's universe of likely voters pushes Obama beyond 50%; he leads by nine points(52 to 43) over McCain with a smaller number of undecided voters.
More good news for Obama: he's gaining back white women who defected to the McCain ticket; the Democrats have a 25 point enthusiasm advantage over Republicans, and concerns about McCain's age are rising.
And here's an interesting nugget: Sarah Palin's biggest favorability rating drop has taken place among white Catholics.
September 23, 2008
Couric To Put Palin Under Microscope
Tomorrow, Gov. Sarah Palin gives her third formal interview; she'll spend time with CBS's Katie Couric in Manhattan. (And Couric also gets to spend Sunday and Monday with Palin, too, in Ohio.)
Couric told me yesterday to she plans to ask Palin about her (relative) lack of exposure to the media.... among other topics.
The Insecurity Gap
It's this: the more economically secure you feel, the more likely you are to back John McCain. The more financially squeezed you feel, the more likely you are to back Barack Obama. According to a fascinating new Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, of the 50% of Americans who feel economically insecure, 60% of them back Barack Obama. Just 21% back McCain; the rest are undecided or don't know. By 13 points, Obama is deemed better equipped to handle "next year's" economic crisis and 14% think he's got a better grip on the economy. Among voters making less than $40,000, 54% are more comfortable with Obama's vision; among voters making more than $100,000, just 36% are.
Interestingly -- and perhaps a reader can explain this for me -- the McCain-supporting affluent respondents also favored more regulation with a greater intensity than voters making less than $100,000. (My guess is that voters making less than $100,000 have more material concerns like health care...)
New Obama Ad Demagogues Foreign Auto Industry
"I've bought American literally all my life," says McCain. But -- as the ad points out -- McCain "owns thirteen vehicles----including three foreign cars---a foreign made Lexus, Volkswagen and Honda Sedan."
Good. Yes. The political point is scored. A field goal, maybe, not a touchdown. Michiganders are uniquely sensitive to the triumphalism of the foreign auto industry, and "Buy American" resonates among a certain demographic. This particular populist trope is usually heard from isolationists, but internationalist Democrats have appropriated it to connect with working class voters feeling the squeeze.
Now -- the ad also portrays McCain as rich and out of touch.
Question: if Japan's making better cars, would Obama urge Americans to buy American?
Palin Shuts Down The Pool; Media Revolts (UPDATE)
Yesterday, this column wondered, facetiously, whether the McCain campaign would shut down its press shop altogether if they concluded that the press was uniformly in the tank for Obama and wouldn't ever give McCain a fair shot.
Last night, the campaign provided locations for Palin's scheduled
meetings with two world leaders and Henry Kissinger to a network TV producer,
who was assigned to provide editorial content on the meetings for the five
television networkers. The reporter was never going to be allowed to sit in on
the private meetings but would be permitted to be on hand for as still and
video journalists took pictures at the beginning of each meeting.
But just a little more than an hour before Palin's first meeting
was set to begin, the pool producer was notified that he would not be allowed
in to the photo spray. This means that the McCain/Palin campaign would get the
benefit of free pictures of Palin's meeting with world leaders without
having to face the possibility that the candidate might have to answer a
question from the media.
Television networks, including <B>CBS News</b> maintain a
policy that if they are prevented from having an editorial presence at an event,
they will not allow cameras to shoot
Hence -- no more network/national coverage of pool events Which might work for the McCain campaign because local TV coverage of Palin is usually much less skeptical.
A stand-off between the media and the McCain campaign.
The transgression? Apparently last week, CBS News's Scott Conroy had the temerity to ask a question of Palin during an OTR session.
Who blinks first? UPDATE: A CNN pool producer was allowed into a camera spray of Gov. Palin's meeting with Hamid Karzai for all of 29 seconds. No other pencils, as they call them, were allowed in.
Now -- in an effort to build some good will, the McCain campaign has scheduled a press conference this afternoon -- his first since August 13.
Not to be outdone, Barack Obama, in Tampa, Florida for debate prep, will also take some Q and As.
Obama And Ayres
Associations can be fair game, but here's my question about Barack Obama and William Ayres:
What specific projects -- "radical" projects -- did Obama work on with Ayres? Is there evidence that they collaborated and schemed to ... do anything "radical" together? Ever?
Or just that they served on a board of a fairly well-respected liberal charity at the same time? And that left-leaning charities tend to give money to left-leaning organizations, a la ACORN?
Is the real story here that Obama once served on the board of a liberal education charity?
The Clintons And Obama
Via Ben Smith, an excellent observation about how former President Clinton is playing the analyst these days, not the surrogate.
But when, even when his wife was running, did Clinton filter his political thoughts? At the height of the 2000 election, Clinton decided to call the New York Times's chief political correspondent and chat about Al Gore's strategy. Can't find the link, but trust this column: it wasn't helpful.
Still no word as to when Bill Clinton will campaign for Barack Obama. His first appearance will inevitably be a huge news event.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press/Yahoo poll has numbers suggesting that Barack Obama is still getting the support of only 58% of self-identified Clinton primary voters. But that's a weird number. All the polls agree that Obama is tied -- or even slightly losing -- among independents. Yet -- he's still leading John McCain. Where does he get his support from, if not from Democrats? Most other polls show Obama's having gained substantial support from Clinton Democrats over the past few months.
The distribution
and categories are based on polling, historical trends, conversations
with the campaigns, and the thoughts of smart analysts in those states.
MARGINAL TOSS UPS -- states where historical voting patterns seem to be asserting themselves but exogenous factors prevent the electorate from
leaning to a particular candidate at this point. TRUE TOSS UPS --
states where historical voting patterns are not asserting themselves
AND exogenous factors prevent the electorate from leaning.
-----------
Likely Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA (190 electoral votes)
One move: New Hampshire from lean Obama to toss-up, owing to some recent polling showing McCain ahead.
But there is no data showing that McCain's convention bounce has changed the electoral map much. Over the week, I'll be watching state polls in the industrial Midwest to see whether the shock of the economic crisis is hurting McCain.
What ought to worry the McCain campaign: they had their best week of the cycle, and the state polls didn't move. And, truth be told, in states like Virginia, Obama is doing what he needs to, demographically, to win.
A few other notes:
Colorado -- Democrats are outworking Republicans in this state, and the convention was a huge boost.
Nevada -- McCain has an edge, but
it's a slight one. Obama is doing well enough among Hispanics
nationally to win in Nevada, and the Obama campaign has been all over
the state's growth areas since late last year.
Wisconsin is more competitive today than it was before Sarah Palin's pick,
although both campaigns believe that Obama has a slight advantage,
particularly with the focus on the economy.
Is Obamaland Spreading Anti-Palin YouTubes? An Assessment
Here, courtesy of the Jawa Report, is a summary of the evidence they provide to back up the claim that the Obama campaign is linked to scurrilous anti-Palin videos circulating on the web.
Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about
Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.
The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.
Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort
to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone
viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.
Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included
actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with
the family running the company.
The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.
This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David
Axelrod's firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots
efforts, otherwise known as "astroturfing."
David Axelrod is Barack Obama's chief media strategist.
The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign
Independently evaluating each claim is beyond the scope of this column, or, frankly, this column's interest -- having been very much engaged with the subject, I did not come across the videos, and there is no evidence that their circulation escaped the echo chamber of the liberal blogosphere. But let's assume that every datum is correct and take the charge seriously.
The problem is that logically, one cannot infer, from the evidence above, that the Obama campaign had any formal or informal role in the distribution of these videos. (Could an Obama aide or two -- one or two of a thousand employees-- have forwarded the video to a friend? Yes -- but that tells us nothing.) Indeed, what the evidence implies is that a liberal PR firm decided to gin up some anti-Palin viral videos. That's it.
The circumstantial evidence against the Obama campaign's involvement is not compelling either, but it is at least as compelling as the evidence for it.
For example -- the videos were poorly hidden and easily traceable. (eswinner) -- It's easy on YouTube to be sneaky about these things. The videos' creators did not take pains to hide the videos until citizen journalists called them out, and the hasty effort to take them down suggests that that no organized thought was given to a "cover up" -- which, in these cases, is always more outrageous than the crimes.
Second -- using the same voice over artist... if you were intent on creating stealth videos, you'd be monumentally stupid to use a recognizable voice over artist - or one that's worked for the Obama campaign before.
Third -- the video is professional. Yes. It's very easy to create professional-looking videos these days. That says nothing.
Fourth -- readers kindly send me a dozen or so professionally-produced YouTube videos every week; many of them are amusing and others are silly. What pops -- and the Obama and McCain campaign know this -- is not professionally produced videos; what pops is raw footage of errant quotations or gaffes. Or the occasional humor video produced for its humorous content only. These type of videos never pop.
Partisans of the Republican ticket have every right to believe that the Obama campaign is malevolent, and to assume the worst of motivations; certainly, liberal partisans reciprocate. But it takes a willfull suspension of belief to assume that the Obama campaign is stupid.
For the record, here is what Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor has to say:
"This
one ranks as one of the most outlandish conspiracy theories in a campaign that
has had its share of them. Neither our campaign nor any of our
consultants had any involvement with this YouTube video, and the McCain
campaign should provide a shred of believable evidence before advancing false
allegations and misleading voters yet another time."
Biden Repudiates Obama Ad On McCain's Computer Use
Remember the Obama campaign ad making fun of Sen. John McCain for not using a computer? This line --
He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send an
e-mail, still doesn't understand the economy, and favors two hundred
billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the
middle class,"
got a lot of attention.
Was it a dig at his age? His out-of-touch-ness? Was it appropriate given that McCain is physically incapable of e-mailing?
Whatever it was, Sen. Joe Biden thinks it was out of bounds:
He told Katie Couric late last week that he didn't know that the campaign was going to run the ad -- and had he known, "if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it."
Here's the full exchange:
COURIC: Are you disappointed with the tone of the campaign? The lipstick on the pig stuff and some of the ads - you guys haven't been completely guilt free making fun of John McCain using a computer.
BIDEN: I thought that was terrible by the way.
COURIC: Why did you do it then?
BIDEN: I didn't know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it. And I don't think Barack, you know. I just think that was ...
COURIC: Did Barack Obama approve that ad?
BIDEN: The answer is I don't think there was anything intentional about that. They were trying to make another point. That's very different than deliberately taking a vote Barack Obama had to teach children how to deal with predators and saying he was teaching them sex education in kindergarten. Very different in degree.
Sign Of The Times; McCain Camp Accuses Reporter Of Being In Obama "Tank"
A reporter asks the McCain campaign to back up some basic claims made by a senior strategist in a public conference call.
The campaign refuses, with a prominent spokesperson accusing the reporter, Ben Smith, of being "in the tank."
As in -- no, we don't have to justify what we say, and the fact that you would question our assertions is proof-positive that you've absorbed the Obama campaign's worldview.
Not only is that Addington-esque in its logic -- the spokesperson is PAID by one tank, so how can he possibly make that accusation credibly -- it's also immature (like throwing reporters off planes) and counterproductive. Maybe I'm in Ben Smith's tank for saying this.
Perhaps we can forgive the McCain campaign for this moment of irrationality; even as they've turned the press into a bugbear, the McCain campaign has managed to operate a functioning press office that answers reporters questions and its officials are generally helpful and polite.
The same officials who criticize reporters to our faces and behind our backs also help us understand policy, or get in touch with a campaign official, or explain the underpinnings of their tactics and strategems.
Here's hoping that today's outburst was an aberration and not a sign that the campaign will be shutting down its press shop for good.
Dodd Proposals A Solid Political Step For Democrats
Democrats now have a counter-proposal, something for the base to rally around and its presidential candidates to embrace.
Significantly, the ball now bounces back to Sec. Paulson and President Bush. They can't blame the Democrats for coming up with nothing.
Mere politics -- how we hold our leaders accountable -- has asserted itself in the crisis.
Wall Street's nervous; they want action quickly.
Courtesy of the Politico, read the Dodd bill here.
McCain Camp Sues Ohio Secretary of State
Debates about election integrity usually pit Democrats worried about access against Republicans worried about fraud. In Ohio, a flashpoint has partisans taking the opposite sides: Republicans accuse the Democratic secretary of state of trying to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters.
Today, lawyers for the McCain campaign sued the Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, allegeding that she's unlawfully rejecting absentee ballot requests. In Hamilton County, as many as a third of all requests were deemed invalid, sending the campaign scrambling to recontact voters.
Why?
Not because the forms lacked the requisite signatures and information. It's because the forms, printed by the McCain campaign, had something extra -- a box that asked voters to verify that " I am a qualified elector and would like to receive an Absentee Ballot for the November 4, 2008 General Election."
Labor voters save day for Dems in states like and Ohio and Michigan, and the AFL-CIO is accumulating evidence that its political program influences, in particular, the votes of white men.
"For white men, regular church-goers -- if they're union members, we win them," said Karen Ackerman, the AFL-CIO political director. The same goes for NRA members and the larger universe of gun owners.
The outlines of the AFL-CIO's member to member effort are well known and have been widely reported on, but the organization rarely divulges details about their statewide targeting. Such information is proprietary. Ackerman shared a few numbers, though, about Ohio, numbers that suggest a fairly strong thumb on the scale for Democrats.
There are 2.1 million union voters in Ohio; the AFL-CIO has contacted an additional 1.6 million labor force voters as part of its Working America program, which allows non-union members to associate with the AFL-CIO.
Working America is now an integral part of the AFL's program, and it almost doubles the universe of voters that the AFL-CIO is able to contact. In 2006, only 42% of Working America members self-identified as Democrats. 79% of Working America members voted for Gov. Ted Strickland -- a correlation, to be sure, but a strong one.
An AFL-CIO official said that internal union research showed that worksite contacts are as much as 30 times more effective than non-personal direct mail pieces. And every union member will be contacted at least 25 times through the course of the program. In addition, the AFL-CIO has around 500 field organizers making phone calls every night.
Special targets this year include seniors, retirees and veterans. AFL-CIO officials were reluctant to say whether they had detected any racial prejudice from members; in any event, much of their persuasion mail that's been made public has focused on demythologizing Barack Obama and highlighting his family's working class background.
Diageo/Hotline Tracking 9/23
A three night track...
Obama: 47% McCain: 43% Undecided: 9%
McCain Lays Groundwork For Bailout Opposition
The McCain campaign is sending strong hints that, unless the government bailout is substantially revised, McCain might lead Republican opposition to it in the Senate.
Last night, the campaign sent reporters a background e-mail previewing McCain's remarks today.
McCain, in Scranton, PA this morning, said he was "deeply uncomfortable" that "so much power and money been
concentrated in the hands of one person."
"When we are talking about a trillion dollars of taxpayer
money 'trust me' just isn't good enough," he said.
A McCain adviser refused to rule-out any scenario, including a nay vote by McCain. "John McCain is interested in Main Street and the American worker. John McCain is interested in the American taxpayer. And those are the decision points for him as the package comes together. [At this point,] there is no package."
Schmidt Blisters New York Times; Calls It "Pro-Obama Advocacy Organization"
Ostensibly, the conference call was convened to explain their new ad about Barack Obama's ties to Chicago machine politics. But when a reporter referenced a New York Times story this morning, McCain strategist Steve Schmidt could not help himself:
"We are first amendment absolutists on this campaign," he said. "Of course, it is constitutionally protected with regard to writing whatever they want to write. Let's be clear and be honest with each other. Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization.
"It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day, attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Gov. Palin and excuses Sen. Obama."
"There is no level of public vetting. There is no level of outrage ... let's not be dishonest and call it something other than what it is. Everything that is in the New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated from that perspective."
Schmidt's particular bill of complaints included the lack of scrutiny directed at Sen. Joe Biden's son Hunter, a lobbyist. The Times has covered the story, twice.
NRA Begins Multi-Million-Dollar Television Ad Campaign
The National Rifle Association's political arm launched a flight of television and radio ads today that portray the Obama-Biden ticket as "radical" and Obama as a gun-grabber who plans "a huge new tax" on "guns and ammo."
Below, television and radio ads airing in Pennsylvania. An NRA official says that the group has purchased ad time in Colorado and New Mexico, and more states will come online soon.
The Obama campaign released a white paper this morning on his new government ethics and transparency proposals. Some of them he's spoken about before -- like open budgeting, televised regulatory hearings and the appointment of a government chief technology officer; what's below is new:
-- create a new agency to identify and track corporate welfare recipients, he'll give the Office of Government Ethics officers (4,000) in total more authority and the agency the ability to make binding regulations. Note: the OGE will become the clearinghouse for all public records about ethics in the executive branch. -- eliminate "ideological performance goals --work to increase the president's authority to change or eliminate programs entirely; he "will also experiment
with giving government managers the ability to work with their teams to
establish goals and to give bonuses when those goals are met." -- reduce layers middle management in Washington -- strengthen whistleblower protection laws -- cut federal spending on contractors by 10 percent, which would say, in his view, $40 billion. -- end the use of no-bid contracts and forbid the granting of federal contracts for tax delinquent companies
McCain's New Line Of Attack
We've heard for months that Barack Obama was an empty-handed, idealistic neophyte. Now, John McCain's election strategists in Arlington want to transform him into a scheming insider-urban-machine politician. Beginning with a television "ad" that questions Obama's relationship to machine fixtures and continuing with surrogate attacks and research hits, the goal is to undermine Obama's reformer credentials during the economic crisis and to situate his ambition, putting him alongside corrupt Chicago politicians. The McCain campaign claims the ad will run nationally, but they've scheduled a conference call with Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to pound home the point.
The ad itself is a breezy, guilt-by-association tour. One line notices simply that Rod Blagojevich happens to be the governor of Illinois. "His governor, Rod Blagojevich. A legacy of federal and state investigations."
Obama continues to hit McCain for allegedly wanting to subject the health care system to the same deregulation he blames for the collapse of the banking system, unveiling a new ad this morning showing McCain and Bush together, McCain and Bush together, McCain and Bush together.
The Bailout Jam
The financial system was on the brink last week, with lawmakers privy to more information about how critical the situation was, and the base activists from both parties wondering why the panic level shot up from 0 to 100. A 3-page outline was handed out Friday; Sunday, it had grown to seven pages. We saw over the weakened some tweaks and a little more specificity over the weekend in terms of what kind of institutions will be covered and what types of assets will be purchased. We still don't have all the details, including how they will make things like reverse auction will work when the assets are not easily comparable.
In terms of total impact on the economy, the action by the Fed and the Treasury certainly helped push the crash talk back. Both Obama and McCain face pressure to oppose the bailout; liberals and conservatives question the wisdom of transferring so much (unchecked, uncheckable) power to an unelected arbiter and both worry about taxpayers being saddled with enormous debts without accountability. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, having finally been tossed the baton, are want to act like they're on top of the situation and to reassert their institutional prerogatives. Unknown at this point: will the public blame Congress is a package isn't passed in time? What does "in time" actually mean? Is it wise to saddle the next president with such an enormous responsibility without taking the time to consider some of the less obvious counter-arguments? Can one party maneuver so as to jam up the other?
September 21, 2008
Will Racial Prejudice Hurt Obama? No One KNows.
The truth is that there are so many variables and not enough information. We've never had an African American presidential nominee before. We don't know whether local effects are different from national effects, and whether a national conversation about race and voting will trigger the type of implicit associations that cause some whites to vacillate about Obama.
Social science offers some clues, but they are thin gruel -- the Bradley effect seems to have dropped off in black-challenger/white incumbent races since 1996; implicit racial prejudice exists; Obama did not experience a "Bradley effect" in the primaries, although tens of thousands of voters admitted to exit pollsters that race influenced their vote against Obama.
But these tell us next to nothing about what will happen in the general election.
September 20, 2008
Racial Associations And Implicit Associations: Or -- Will White Dem Racism Cost Obama The Election?
Will white Democratic racism cost Barack Obama an election he really should win? For months, the highest level of Obama political advisers have publicly cast doubt on the scenario. Their thinking assumes that Obama's turnout demography will compensate for older white Democrats who are uncomfortable with Obama's race, and that white women under 50 living outside cities -- the marginal voters in this election -- while not being entirely immune from racial conditioning and subconscious associations -- are nonetheless swayable by many other Obama attributes.
The Obama campaign is no monolith when it comes to this question. Some advisers, are worried. And there is anecdotal evidence that the campaign's microtargeting -- read about it here -- is envisioned and implemented with one major aim being the rendering of Barack Obama as safe and unthreatening.
Andrew Sullivan has argued that race is but one of several uncomfortable traits that Obama possesses, traits that widen an already existing generational fissure, pit young against old, and heighten, for many, a sense of cultural insecurity about a man whose lifestory is American -- 21st century American, just not the American story they are used to. The slogan of Andrew's blog is that "To See."
The AP story has provoked a furious counterreaction from those who want to believe that America is ready to elect a black president. Some of the points are valid, although they focus on the application of the argument and not the science.
For one, the universe studied by Stanford is larger than the universe of those who vote, but there tends to be a correlation in attitudes between voters and non-voters. Another objection is that tests like the implicit association test -- and the AP used something called the affect misattribution procedure -- are flawed. Try the implicit association test (again, not precisely what the AP used) yourself. It has withstood most scholarly skepticism, at least with its thin claims, which is that there are often unconscious associations between concepts and attributes, and those associations often form a pattern, even if one cannot prove that the pattern is independent of experience, and even if one cannot prove that internal perception matters more in terms of race relations than conscious, explicit judgments. (See more here and here.) A scary finding: even African Americans are not immune to the effect.
1. That the nation's legislative leaders came out of their meetings with Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson "stunned" about the magnitude of the crisis -- i.e, 3.4 trillion in money market wealth wiped away -- is, in and of itself stunning. Though some members of Congress warned about overleveraging Fannie and Freddie and some warned of tough times to come, none seems to have anticipated -- or gotten on top of -- the multiplicty of mini crises that led to the flood this week. The distance between what Washngton assumed and what Wall Street did is huge, and an Acela train can't bridge it. Congress stood by, powerless, jaw-dropped, as the capital markets shut down and the government ran the show this week. The impact of this week on what a President Obama and President McCain are able to do in office is completely unknown.
BTW: Did any presidential candidate, aside from Ron Paul, have any inkling of the Fed's emergency power?
2. John McCain stumbled badly early in the week, bumblng through several days of gaffes and appearing to confirm a reality that the Obama was portraying -- that he was out of touch. But starting Thursday, with his widely-mocked-by-elites call for firing Chris Cox and today, with his aggressive focus on Fannie and Freddie and Obama's connections to them, he seemed to recover his footing. Americans probably do want a culprit, and the Fannie/Freddie crony capitalism, while certainly not the whole or even a few chapters in the story, is as good as any. What McCain will do over the weekend and into next week is begin to explain why his principles for the bailout are different from President Bush's.
3. The Obama campaign was widely and appropriately rapped for a misleading and tendentious Spanish radio ad, Obama was criticized for overinflating his role in an earlier stimulus package and had a weird public response to the AIG bailout. By the end of the week, he was involved in a tit-for-tat over which candidate had more connections to Fannie and Freddie. On Friday, McCain found a culprit and Obama had a meeting. Obama still had the better week -- and, truth be told, when it comes to the economy, the thumb is so much on the Democratic side of the scale this election that he really didn't have to do anything to have a good week.
4. Sarah Palin continues to draw enormous crowds and continues to overshadow her running mate to some degree. The bloom is off the rose (the fur is off the moose?); we know the basic outline of her political footprint; Palin helped with the base and not so much with anyone else.
Has The Wilder Effect Disappeared?
Concerned that references to the Wilder effect have entered the political lexicon without a large scale study demonstrating its impact and its relevance to contemporary political dynamics, a grad student at the Kennedy School of Government named Daniel Hopkins set out to to see whether he could measure a discernible Wilder effect beyond the iconographic examples of the 1980s (Dinkins was up by 18 but won by 2!, Wilder, Bradley, etc.).
Hopkins looked at all senatorial and gubernatorial races that featured a woman or an African-American candidate from 1989 to 2006 -- a total of 133 races. For each, he found at least one poll released within a month of Election Day, enabling him to measure the gap between a candidate's polling and performance.
Hopkins finds some evidence that African-American candidates suffered from something resembling a Wilder effect before 1996, but since then, the effect seems to have disappeared.
This becomes the key finding of Hopkins's study: The Wilder effect is not a durable phenomenon. Rather, it is dependent on particular political conditions.
His theory is that when racially charged issues like welfare and crime dominated the political rhetoric, racial factors affected voting behavior and the Wilder effect asserted itself. But once welfare disappeared as a salient issue in 1996, political discourse was deracialized and race was less of a factor in voters' mind.
Hopkins finds that the salience of racial factors depends on the tone of the national environment, not on the tone of local candidates. He explains that black candidates before 1996 were victim of the Wilder effect whether or not they ran a deracialized campaign; after 1996, white candidates were not able to benefit from that effect even when they attempted to exploit racially charged issues. This also applies to the Democratic primaries of 2008, where Hopkins finds that there was no Wilder effect affecting Obama's performance.
To preempt possible concerns about his study's validity, Hopkins takes a look at alternative explanations for the polling-performance gap. First, he considered whether the Wilder effect only affects African-American candidates or whether it hurts other under-represented groups. Analyzing races that featured a female candidate, he finds that women do not suffer from any Wilder effect - quite the contrary, female candidates on average perform better than their polling indicated.
Second, Hopkins considers the possibility that the polling-performance gap can be attributed to what he calls the "front-runner's fall." Hopkins explains that front-runners' support can be overstated because of their higher name recognition and because of classical regression to the mean, making it necessary to account for such an effect before determining what impact racial bias in Wilder or Dinkins' decline. After running additional tests, Hopkins determines that some of the polling-performance gap can be attributed to a front-runners' fall, but that the Wilder effect is still at play.
In other words, the Wilder effect tends to increase in function of an African-American candidate's initial support. Hopkins argues that this leads to the hype that surrounds the Wilder effect. The candidates that are most associated to that effect - Wilder, Dinkins and Bradley - were all favored to win. That is what got their campaigns so much coverage in the first place and it made their performance gap that much more dramatic - creating a somewhat naïve buzz around the Wilder effect.
A Cross-Section Of Reader Comments The Economy
This ain't Asymettrical Information, but us dumb political folks can learn from our more economically minder readers.
Reader D:
Your ornery reader is mostly correct* that Megan has it completely backwards about the value of T-bonds. More demand for T-bonds as a safe haven means the government can sell bonds at lower interest rates, thus reducing borrowing costs.
But another flaw in Megan's argument is that it's simply impossible to predict where the markets will be one week or month from now, let alone on Jan. 20. If the big bailout package stabilizes the system and things are looking up for the markets and the economy by the end of the year, the next president may be plausibly able to argue that any drop in revenue is temporary and will not require major changes in his agenda. This would be especially likely if it's Obama making the case to a Democratic Congress.
*Even the ornery reader whiffs on some details. For people buying bonds today, the bonds are "worth less" than those they could have bought a month ago, because today's bonds earn lower interest. For those who bought last month's bonds, their bonds are now worth more than face value because they earn more in interest than today's bonds. For bonds, yield and price move in opposite directions.
Reader V:
Policymakers are just starting to treat this as a potentially huge financial calamity. Congress didn't mind the failure of a bunch of institutions and didn't appreciate the underlying dangers that have been bewing. The massive losses across the market this week, however, and particularly the huge problem in the money market account is what created the catalyst for the action we're seeing contemplated now. The money market industry -- 4.3 trillion in assets -- was literally headed for elimination which would have essentially suspended corporate funding and placed at risk the assets of a huge number of small investors who thought they were in safe assets. That was the edge of the precipice which seems to have created this action consensus. Prior to the last 48 hours there would not have been the political will to put more tax payer funding on the line as we now see.
Hotline/Diageo Tracking, 9/19
A three night track (9/16, 9/17, 9/18)
Obama: 45%
McCain: 44%
Name That Bailout
Campaign Counsels Exchange Tense E-Mails On Michigan Dispute
For years, Bob Bauer and Trevor Potter found themselves on the oppopsite side of major election law disputes. Potter, the long-time counsel to McCain and a former FEC chairman, helped to push for major campaign finance regulation; Bauer, representing Democratic candidates and interest groups, often pushed back. Their relationship was collegial. It's now very tense.
Bauer is now the Obama campaign's lawyer of record, while Potter spends the majority of his time tending to the McCain campaign's legal issues.
On a popular listserv for election law experts and their admirers, a recent e-mail exchange between the two provides a unique window into their worldviews -- and into the worldviews of the campaigns as they prepare for the most important election of modern times.
The proximate cause is the disputed report that Macomb County Republican chairman James Carabelli bragged the Republicans were going to use lists of foreclosed homes to challenge voters on election day. Preposterous, the state GOP said. Democrats responded with a lawsuit seeking injunctive relief -- preventative injunctive relief. The "more access" versus "ballot integrity" arguments began in earnest, only with a twist: Carabelli insisted that he didn't say what he was reported to have said, the McCain campaign insists it has no plans to aggressively challenge voters, and they've accused the Democrats of acting in bad faith.
Potter, responding to another election lawyer's question about Michigan, unleashed this broadside:
I quite agree that IF the various Democratic Party committees were truly interested in ensuring that Michigan voters were not challenged based on foreclosure lists, then "best practices" would have included reaching out and suggesting a non-partisan approach to ensure such challenges are not made by either party (especially as the MI GOP had already publicly stated it will not engage in the practice). INSTEAD, the Democratic lawyers called a nationwide press conference to publicize a tactic they admit the Republicans have disclaimed, and filed a suit in Michigan and a letter with the Attorney General of the United States--all based entirely on a blog-reported statement by a single Michigan County chair who denied making it.. The Michigan suit actually contains the extraordinary criticism that the Michigan Republican Party was creating public confusion by DENYING that the phony "plan" existed! So, the answer to Patrick Rose's question is that the non-partisan approach was open to the Democrats, but they chose a purely partisan one for purely political purposes ("Republicans want to kickpeople hurt by economic hard timeswhile they are down" was the real political message in these legal maneuvers). That's politics--but not election law.
It is worth noting that neither the Obama campaign nor the DNC have responded to the letter from Senators Danforth and Rudman earlier this week suggesting precisely the sort of non-partisan (or more accurately bi-partisan) cooperation that [Patrick] Rose suggests. Based on these Michigan lawsuits and press releases and letters, I don't expect they will be taking up the Danforth/Rudman offer, if they do ever respond.
This morning, Bob Bauer, general counsel for the Obama campaign, responded on his blog:
On the other side, of course, we have the long history of documented Republican Party vote suppression developed and executed at the highest institutional levels. We need only look at recorded law enforcement actions, at the findings against Republican "caging" and the imposition of remedies provided by law. This legal history is not crammed in a tight time period: it is, as Chandler Davidson and others have shown, a programmatic party commitment pursued over many decades. The party is quite proud of it: it holds conferences (of the Republican National Lawyers Association) and otherwise holds forth on the topic, and it looks forward to the quadrennial re-publication of John Fund's compendium of anecdotes. And their representatives go about "caging" as one of their preferred strategies for controlling the" fraud" that is always present to their fevered minds or part of their strategic calculations.
Against this history, Potter asks that we credit the denials of Carabelli. He said he did not mean it, didn't he? Not exactly: recently, a Michigan radio station I was invited to call into played a tape of this "denial." Perhaps before the national party had squeezed the last bit of candor out of him, Carabelli huffed only that he had been "misinterpreted" and that he had answered a "leading question."
As denials go, this one is in need of work; and whatever it is, it is not of the absolute and unqualified kind. What leading question might he have been asked? Perhaps it was, "Are you planning to use foreclosure lists to challenge voters," to which he seems to have answered "yes." That the question was leading does not render the answer false. About the nature of the "misinterpretation," Carabelli said nothing. He was lost: this handlers up the chain had yet to descend upon him.
Just Asking...
Where is Sen. Joe Lieberman these days?
Palin Aide: Palin -- ON BACKGROUND -- Is Great
Per Scott Conroy, the CBS News reporter traveling with Gov. Palin, an aide to Palin actually let these words escape the barrier of her or his teeth:
"We go into today with a candidate who's got, on background, enormous clarity and action versus a candidate of contemplation and confusion."
Who knows what's going to happen with this bailout, but what's the alternative? This intervention, at least, has the
chance to contain the mortgage fallout without dragging down the
pillars of our economy.
Is Paulson using the short-selling ban to pressure Wall Street into pressuring Congress to get a deal done?
Where will the hundreds of billions of dollars come from?
Who gets off easy?
What becomes of moral hazard?
Should Congress get this done quickly, even if it produces a flawed product? Or it should it take a few weeks and get it done right?
Is the administration of the new RTC or whatever it turns out to be THE big task facing the next president?
New AFL-CIO Mailer Hits McCain's "Fundamentals" Comment
This one will be sent to one million union households across the country, an AFL-CIO official says.
Conservative Think Tanks On Bailouts
A source at a prominent right-leaning think tank e-mails:
We ... are on strict 'no comment' lockdown. We've even pulled some analysts of scheduled TV spots and have been declining any new appearances on the issue.
The analysts I work with are supportive of the AIG deal. But there is significant push back from higher ups on the board that don't like it.
Hence our silence.
Obama's Faith Tour
One of the lesser known but fairly important activity that the national media tends to overlook these days is how aggressively the Obama campaign has been using surrogates and peer-to-peer canvassing to convince ...well, working class whites that Obama isn't some unknown force but instead is a guy who is like them...enough like then anyway, and shares their values.
CBN News gets exclusive word of a major surrogate effort that'll launch next week. The Obama campaign calls it their Faith, Family and Values Tour, with the slogan: "Voting ALL Our values."
The Brody File is told that top faith surrogates will hit the
trail for Obama. Some of those high profile figures include Former Indiana Congressman
and pro-life Democrat Tim Roemer, Catholic legal scholar Doug Kmiec, and author
Donald Miller. You can also expect a soon to be named Evangelical North
Carolina (red state) Congressman to travel the country as well. All of these
surrogates are well versed and comfortable talking faith and politics. This is
clearly a sign by the Obama campaign that they plan to target red state and
swing state moderates.
The key here is targeting. This isn't an effort to corral single-issue evangeliclals, who, even before the choice of Palin, weren't going to vote for Obama. Instead, the tour will hit cities and towns and neighborhoods with a massive of moderate mainline protestants and modernist Catholics. The campaign has crunched a lot of data and knows, for example, where to go in a state like Indiana to find moderate to conservative Methodists, and where to not to waste their time (i.e., courting Southern Baptists.)
The Obama campaign takes heart at public polling showing that Obama is running strongly among white Catholics and well among just about every identifiable religious group -- outisde of conservative evangelicals.
McCain: Fannie, Freddie Coddling Created Wall Street Mess
The Frank Raines ad turns out to be the recon team for a brand new line of attack from the McCain campaign: Congress's (or the Democrats) coddling of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the 1990s, which led to an enormous housing bubble, and Barack Obama, who got lots of cash from Fannie and Freddie, let it happen:
If Governor Palin and I are
elected in 46 days, we are not going to waste a moment in changing the
way Washington does business. And we're going to start where the need
for reform is greatest. In short order, we are going to put an end to
the reckless conduct, corruption, and unbridled greed that have caused
a crisis on Wall Street.
Here and all across our
country, people are wondering what exactly is happening on Wall Street.
And with good reason, they want to know how their government will meet
the crisis. Clear answers are hard to come by in Washington.
As Senator Obama's leader in
Congress memorably put it the other day -- and I quote -- "no one knows
what to do." Perhaps given that reaction, it shouldn't surprise us that
the Congressional leaders of this do-nothing Congress also said that
they weren't going to take action until after the election, claiming
that it wasn't their fault. I am hopeful that last night's discussions
are a sign they have changed their mind and will take action soon. But
any action should be designed to keep people in their homes and safe
guard the life savings of all Americans by protecting our financial
system.
There are certainly plenty of
places to point fingers, and it may be hard to pinpoint the original
event that set it all in motion. But let me give you an educated guess.
The financial crisis we're living through today started with the
corruption and manipulation of our home mortgage system. At the center
of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who
succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the
festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
These quasi-public corporations
lead our housing system down a path where quick profit was placed
before sound finance. They institutionalized a system that rewarded
forcing mortgages on people who couldn't afford them, while turning
around and selling those bad mortgages to the banks that are now going
bankrupt. Using money and influence, they prevented reforms that would
have curbed their power and limited their ability to damage our
economy. And now, as ever, the American taxpayers are left to pay the
price for Washington's failure.
Two years ago, I called for
reform of this corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Congress did
nothing. The Administration did nothing. Senator Obama did nothing, and
actually profited from this system of abuse and scandal. While Fannie
and Freddie were working to keep Congress away from their house of
cards, Senator Obama was taking their money. He got more, in fact, than
any other member of Congress, except for the Democratic chairmen of the
committee that oversees them. And while Fannie Mae was betraying the
public trust, somehow its former CEO had managed to gain my opponent's
trust to the point that Senator Obama actually put him in charge of his
vice presidential search.
Note: McCain mentions the Cox firing in his speech; the focus has changed.
Playing The "Playing The Race Card" Card
Time's Karen Tumulty all but calls the McCain campaign's new Frank Raines ad racist: "Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman." Here's the "ad" -- not sure if it's airing anywhere to allow the scare quotes to drop.
September 18, 2008
Biden's "Sick And Tired Of This Phoniness"
From an interview today with CBS's Katie Couric:
Katie: "Your vice presidential rival,
Governor Palin, said "To the rest of America, that's not patriotism.
Raising taxes is about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making
things worse."
Biden: "How many small businessmen
are making one million, four hundred thousand--average in the top 1
percent. Give me a break. I remind my friend, John McCain, what he said--when Bush
called for war and tax cuts--he said, it was immoral, immoral, to take a nation
to war and not have anybody pay for it. I am so sick and tired of this
phoniness. The truth of the matter is that we are in trouble. And the
people who do not need a new tax cut should be willing, as patriotic Americans,
to understand the way to get this economy back up on their feet is to give
middle class taxpayers a break. We take the tax cut they're getting and
we give it to the middle class."
The Daily Bric-A-Brac: Game Is Changed
A former publisher of National Review endorses Obama, as does Rep. Wayne Gilchrist of Maryland, a Republican.
Eight new battleground state polls courtesy of Charles Franklin and the University of Wisconsin are here.
Megan lays out why neither Barack Obama nor John McCain will able to spend a red cent. Repealing those Bush tax cuts ain't gonna do it anymore. If Obama gets elected, he'll take office just as tax revenues plummet.
She also argues that ...
Barack Obama will not get his middle class tax cut.
Barack Obama will probably have to radically trim back his spending plans.
The Democrats will have to abandon Paygo.
McCain will probably not be able to make the Bush tax cuts permanent.
So -- couldn't McCain or Obama just borrow more?
As Megan explained it to me, the flight to quality has pushed down the value of T-bonds -- when they recover is unknown -- and continued concerns about the financial system might increase the borrowing costs. Who's going to want to lend us money
Update: an ornery reader writes:
The value of treasury bonds is going down not for the government which
issues them but for those buying them. Interest rates are going down
because so many people want a reliable place to put money that they are
literally willing to pay the federal government to hold their money,
hence negative interest rates. In short, the answer to your question
<i>Who's going to want to lend us money?</i> if by "us" you
mean the federal government, is everyone, because its a lot less likely
to fail than banks right now.
Here's The Thing About Spain
Nobody thinks that Spain is our enemy.
The Bush Administration was trying to punish Spain for pulling out of Iraq, certainly, but they were at least cognizent enough to not make a huge public ruckus about it.
In the mind of the average voter -- Spain is Europe.
It's Barcelona. It's Madrid. It's basically Italy. It's Mediterranean and sexy. and it has certainly never threatened us, at least since the days of fascism, which are a distant memory to 70-80% of voters.
So....
Brownstein On The Battleground State Polls
More analysis from the wizard, Ron Brownstein:
McCain leads among independents in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. (That Ohio result is a big turnaround from 2004, when exit polls showed Kerry with a double-digit advantage among Ohio independents.) Obama holds a 10-point lead among independents in New Mexico, and the two men split independents almost evenly in Colorado, where they are the fastest-growing segment of the electorate. These independents could prove especially crucial because the portion who are undecided (22 percent across the five states) is much higher than the percentage of undecideds among Democrats or Republicans.
In follow-up interviews, several independents favoring Obama said they had cooled on McCain as he adopted more-conservative positions on issues such as taxes during his race for the GOP nomination. "I really used to like John McCain, and I always said I would vote for him if he ran for president. But he is starting to sound an awful lot like George Bush, which scares me to death," said Christine Cleland, a Realtor from Bristow, Va. "When it comes down to it, John McCain is more ready to be president, but I don't trust what he's going to do when he gets there."
Why Do the New McCain Ads Mention His "Congressional Allies?"
Sen. McCain's campaign released two new battleground states today, one for Michigan and the other for Ohio. They follow the same script. The narrator begins:
Michigan families depend on the auto industry.
John McCain and his Congressional allies know it.
Why, after a week of attacking Congress, would McCain mention his "congressional allies?"
Simple reason: legally, he has to.
The ads are being financed by the Republican National Committee in conjunction with the campaign, an even split, actually, and the law -- McCain's campaign finance law -- allows this division if and only if other candidates are mentioned.
Hence: "congressional allies."
(That's one reason, as the Washington Post notes, that a lot of McCain ads contain glancing references to Democrats.)
Michigan Blog Advised By Democratic Consulting Firm
In the debate over whether the Michigan Republican Party has a (or had a) secret plan to use foreclosure lists to prevent poorer folks from voting, it's worth noting that the website which published the story is being advised by a Democratic consulting firm.
One doesn't have to begrudge the website for hiring a PR firm, but if they intend to assert their independence from a party, clique or ideology, affiliating with prominent Democrats like the former majority leader of the Michigan House doesn't help much.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be so quick to dimiss the Michigan Messenger as just another blog. The consortium that owns it has put together several fairly good (liberal) news and reporting websites, including this one.
I'm willing to meet with any leader that's dedicated to the same principles and philosophy that we are for human rights, democracy, and freedom and I will stand up to those that do not.
This equivocation, combined with most readers' lack of familiarity with the context, has created what on the surface looks like a flap but is might be more than a flutter - a simple restatement of McCain's position.
A blogger at Foreign Policy website sums up the prevailing view of McCain opponents:
As in -- did he have a senior moment? Did he get confused? Did the interviewer have too much of an accent? Was McCain thinking about the Zapatistas in Mexico? The Zapatas? Why did he reference Latin America?
Randy Scheunemann, McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, writes in an e-mail to me that McCain knew precisely what the questioner meant, and that, indeed, "Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview."
But in April, McCain strongly hinted that he'd let bygones be bygones and expected to invite Zapatero to the White House.
Why, I asked by way of follow up, did McCain seem to change his mind?
Here's what Scheunemann e-mailed back:
In this week's interview, Senator McCain did not rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero, a NATO ally. If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance.He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America's adversaries.It's called keeping youtr options open, unlike Senator Obama who has publically committed to meeting some of the world's worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office.
Here's a guess: McCain would meet with Zapatero, but not at the White House. Is Malta still available for these things?
What was in McCain's head is an unanswerable question, and his political antagonists won't give him the benefit of the doubt.
But neither, it seems, will the Spanish press, which instead of reading McCain as signaling his willingness to one day to meet with Zapatero, is reading him as a numbskull who has no idea who Zapatero is.
Obama Supports The ... Fed. The AIG Bailout, Though? Not Sure.
It is probably not fair to expect presidential candidates to have a fully formed opinion on the wisdom of a once-in-a-century federal government takeover of a reinsurance giant. Let's forgive both McCain and Obama for not having a detailed knowledge of the swap market, arbitrage and derivatives.
Still, their initial instincts about nationalization are worth knowing.
The Obama campaign has a firm, unequivocally equivocal answer:
Considering the fact that John McCain flatly opposed the bailout of AIG a day before he changed course and supported it, we're not sure why on earth the McCain campaign wants to have a debate about economic indecision. Barack Obama does not second guess the Fed's decision to take unprecedented action to prevent the failure of one of the largest insurance companies in the world from creating an even larger crisis, and he believes it must protect families who count on insurance.
Ok, but what's Obama's position? Would he have first-guessed the Fed?
Obama seems to be saying that he didn't know enough before the collapse, would have consulted with his advisers, and trusts that the collective wisdom of the Treasury Secretary, Fed governors and economic experts would lead him to the right solution. The Fed has a lot of information that Obama doesn't, and the information asymmetry, Obama seems to be saying, is enough to give them the benefit of the doubt.
McCain (and Joe Biden) viscerally and publicly opposed an AIG bailout, and then both men seem to have been subsequently educated by events.
Hotline/Diageo Tracking, 9/18
A three night track (9/16, 9/17, 9/18)
Barack Obama: 46%
John McCain: 42%
AllState/National Journal Battleground Polls
Yes -- we have our own tracking poll (Hotline-Diageo) And our own weekly battleground state surveys too. (National Journal.)
First, from a sample of 2015 registered voters in Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia, the head-to-head:
Obama 44%
McCain: 44%
Now, to the states:
Drilling down a bit, less than 40% of voters in all of those states except for New Mexico believe that Barack Obama is more prepared to be president than John McCain. Perhaps the "threshold" question is moot; maybe the commander-in-chief threshold is artificial in a change election.
NJ's polling is conducted by Financial Dynamics; Ed Reilly, a Democrat, and Brent McGoldrick, a Republican, supervise the field work and analysis. We're not pretending that these are non-partisan polls... we call 'em bipartisan polls...
Scoring The Tech Innovations
Seems that the Republicans can lay claim to first mastering a total of two: using Google ads to drive traffic to John McCain's website.
And the customized search tool bar that John Weaver and co. created. And Republican activists seem to jump onto Twitter more quickly (see #dontgo) than Dem activists did, but maybe that's just Patrick Ruffini.
The Democrats seem to have leaped ahead of Republicans in using social networking technology to organize; the GOP has a somewhat perfunctory presence there.
The Obama campaign revolutionized the use of text messaging.
Institutionally, the Democratic and Republican Parties seem to be at parity, with both entities efficiently marrying their voter lists with consumer and psychographic information. The GOP is better about sharing their Voter Vault data -- or, at least they were in previous cycles -- so we'll have to see how Democrats do in 2008 before we can compare the two.
The Charlotte Economy
If you're looking for a unique locale to assess the political effects of the market meltdown, try Charlotte, North Carolina.
It's a banking center - home of Wachovia and Bank of America. Obama has had strength in Raleigh/Durham.... The banking crisis and re-focusing on the economy could be a boost in Charlotte area suburbs; a perception of McCain's lack of dexterity on the issue could cost him key votes in a close state.
And now we learn that Obama will visit there on Saturday....
Facebook Helps Rock The Vote, Rock The Vote
Catalist, the keeper of the progressive political world's voter targeting databases, has evolved quickly since it was founded in 2005 into a robust enterprise with dozens of clients and some of the most tricked-out enhanced voter lists in the country.The Obama campaign dives into their data every day, as does virtually every left-leaning political and ideological organization in the country.
Catalist has hundreds of millions of names, numbers and data points, but, as Laura Quinn, Catalist's CEO put it, "we don't have the tools to go out and do walks."In other words, in the case of - and let's choose a non-random example, a group like Rock the Vote can use Catalist data to send voter registration forms to a 25-year-old woman from Arkadelphia, Arkansas who isn't registered, but Catalist couldn't provide a way to organize a canvass, to find someone in that woman's neighborhood or a friend of hers who could nudge her to turn the forms in.
The older, pre-Catalist generation of Democratic field operatives have always prioritized the knock-and-drag over list-keeping, which is one reason why Democratic lists had gotten so dirty in the early part of this decade.
A company called Nico Networks, working along Catalist CTO Vijay Ravindran, developed what Quinn thinks is an ingenious, and, importantly for Catalist, cheap way to bridge the data with the harder work of bothering, persuading and contacting real people. It's an application for the Facebook social networking site, known to the readers of this blog as, ah, Facebook.
Catalist client Rock the Vote launched their app on Saturday by way of a mass e-mail sent to the 44,000 members of its Facebook group. As of this afternoon, 500 Rock-the-voters were using the new tool.On their individualized dashboards, each volunteer is given a list of folks from ten battleground states, who, at some point, downloaded a voter registration form off one of those ubiquitous Rock-The-Vote voter registration widgets. Catalist's computers are able to figure out who returns the forms and who doesn't.
Those who haven't yet returned the forms show up on the list that's sent to Rock to Vote.In 2006, about 20% of those who asked for a form did not turn it in, the group says.This year, that's about 100,000 young voters.
Each "user" is sent a list of names of folks in their area who haven't turned in their form, given their e-mail and phone number, and a sample script.
Did you register, they're coached to ask.
If so, "awesome, thanks!" is the preferred verbiage. If not, they're counseled politely. (A banner at the top of the application warns users not to call after 9:00 pm local time.)
McCain Ad Raises Specter of Big Government Liberals
Barack Obama's solution to the economic crisis, John McCain says in a new ad, is massive government, new taxes, skyrocketing taxes, wasteful pork...
Set the taxes aside for the moment, and ignore the pork red herring. (Metaphorical speciation!)
It's not clear what the level of government intervention that McCain is proposing is all that different than what Sen. Obama is proposing. (Is it? Where?)
Both candidates are probably going to find themselves running a Resolution Trust Corp-like entity that reorganizes a large part of the economy; both are going to find themselves dealing with massive deficits that constrain their spending; McCain will face enormous pressure from Congressional Democrats (it's true) to raise taxes at some point.
These conventional Republican economic talking points don't wear well to more practiced ears, but the McCain campaign has a reason for putting them into an ad: a large majority of Americans rate their personal economic situation as fair-to-good.
ANNCR: When our economy's in crisis, a big government casts a big shadow on us all.
Obama and his liberal Congressional allies want a massive government, billions in spending increases, wasteful pork.
And, we would pay -- painful income taxes, skyrocketing taxes on life savings, electricity and home heating oil.
Can your family afford that?
JOHN MCCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.
Zapatero? Zapatista? Battista?
My theory that Sen. McCain's economic gaffes are more consequential for his political chances than whatever he might say about national security is about to be tested....
Coming Later Today...
The first All State/National Journal Battleground state surveys....
Just Asking...
Assuming that banks begin to lend money again, with the taxpayers suddenly on the hook for $600 billion (+) in liabilities, which presidential candidate will be the first to abandon his ... expensive health care plan? tax cut? energy investment proposals? balanced budget promises?
Ann Selzer Polls Indiana And Finds....
a virtual dead heat, with Barack Obama holding a three point lead over John McCain that, in Selzer's opinion, depends on strong turnout in the Indianapolis metro area.
Selzer, you'll recall, was the only pollster whose data accurately reflected a large swing to Obama in the days before the Iowa caucuses. Other pollsters consider her one of the best in the business.
September 17, 2008
Fact-checking Obama
First, CBS News's Wyatt Andrews reports on a charge that Barack Obama often makes about John McCain's health care plan: that it will result in tax increases for tens of millions of Americans.
The truth is that it... well, it might not-- although McCain would require Americans to begin to pay taxes on the health benefits their employers provide to them, some analysts think that they'd get more than that money back in the form of the refundable tax credit that McCain is proposing to offset the tax hike. (We're talking about a tax on the benefit, not the benefit itself, and McCain would not apply the levy to the payroll tax.)
Of course, if employers drop coverage, the money McCain would give employees might not cover the cost of the premiums which average mroe than $12,000 per family. And one reason for changing the tax incentives is to put the kibosh on the employer-based system. Non-partisan analysts don't think McCain's plan would expand coverage.
And Jake Tapper of ABC News calls Obama out for a tough and misleading radio ad he's running now featuring Rush Limbaugh.
On its face, the notion that John McCain and Rush Limbaugh share the same position on immigration reform is absurd. McCain has changed his tone and his emphasis to move closer to his party, but he's not changed his position, and if he's elected president (with a Democratic Congress), well, here's betting that Mr. Limbaugh won't like the McCain immigration law.
And the only reason why Limbaugh has softened his tone about McCain is because of Sarah Palin.
The ad associates McCain and Limbaugh through the bridge of the Republican Party, but on immigration, the comparison is misleading.
The Daily Bric-A-Brac: Which Politician Will Pull A Chris Cooley?
McCain campaign advisers are serving as legal consultants to Palin's Troopergate lawyer, Newsweek reports.
On the leak of Palin's personal e-mails, the McCain campaign issued a statement:
"This is a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment."
An Obama radio ad uses Rush Limbaugh to paint John McCain as two-faced on immigration.
Democratic strategist Bill Galston begs Obama to get an economic message, and quick!
Ross Douthat wonders what would have happened if McCain had experimented with h...eterogenous ideas.
Who Needs Obama When The McCain Campaign'll Run Against Itself?
There shouldn't be a debate about it: the McCain campaign has made a hash out of the first three days of the week, and most of the forks were manufactured in Arlington.
# The adviser who insisted that McCain tout the fundamentals of the economy. After saying the same thing 15 times and getting dinged for it 15 times.
# The direct but awkward pivot to a (admittedly much better) populism that angered professional conservatives
# Reaping what they sow; even though the campaign had, it turns out, more evidence for their claim that Obama supported sex-education for kindergartners, it took the campaign a week to lay out the case, and when they did, no one was inclined to believe them because they'd just spent the past week questioning the notion of truth;
# The shoddy briefing given to McCain about the financial system, leading to a few days of confusion.
# The adviser who bragged about McCain's inventing the Blackberry.
# The political vetting of Gov. Sarah Palin continues to reap dividends for the Democrats, and the professional conservative class is beginning to grumble.
# Carly Fiorina's honest assessment of her candidate's qualifications, and her subsequent self-recusal.
This summer, when John McCain called Barack Obama a celebrity, he was confirming, in real time, an image that wasn't entirely fictitious. When Obama's campaign claims that, on the economy, McCain is simply out of touch, weeks like this reconfirm, in real time, that notion for voters. McCain can make these type of mistakes on national security and he'll get a pass for them, much to the consternation of Democrats. On the economy, errors, mistakes, gaffes -- they're deadly.
18 States Versus One Country -- Obama and McCain Have Different Ways Of Sizing Up The Electorate
This week, it's McCain supporters whose thinking brains have been taken over by a tumbling of terrifying thoughts. Sarah Palin's favorable numbers have collapsed! McCain's lead is gone! Obama's competitive in states he shouldn't be! The campaign completely mucked up its response to the economic crisis! The truth-fudging didn't work!
Lift up from the thoughts, a bit, and you'll see the race returning to familiar territory, albeit with three important differences: Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting for John McCain than they were thanks to his selection of Gov. Palin, Democrats have unified, mostly, around Barack Obama, and the culture war, which tend to benefit Republicans given the distribution of the electoral college, has been pulled up from the minor leagues.
Enough voters have the same concerns about who Barack Obama is and enough voters have the same concern about whether John McCain represents the continuation of a third Bush term.
In the recent data, there's plenty for both campaigns to take solace in, and plenty for them to be concerned about.
They're interpreting the daily events with reference to their own campaigns' assumptions about how to win the race.
To wit: the Obama campaign will have a massive resource advantage in each state it contests. In past elections, Democrats have had to pull together GOTV operations on the fly as if cramming for the final; this cycle, their field teams are extravagant and efficient. These are multiplier machines, and they're already turned on, culling, identifying and persuading tens of thousands of new voters. The upshot is that historical partisan trends aren't sticky; the electorate within each state has much more give to it relative to the national swing. That's why Indiana, which hasn't voted for a Democrat since 1964, can be considered competitive -- more so than West Virginia.
What does this theory predict insofar as electoral strategy? Don't overload resources in any particular state. Winning Nevada doesn't mean that Obama will win Ohio.
The McCain campaign possesses what one might call a waterline theory of the race. That is: the fundamental partisan orientation of the state matters a lot, is very sticky, and will, in the absence of an absolute tsunami, keep the relative range of the two-party vote roughly the same. In this view, if Obama can win Indiana, he'll definitely be able to win Missouri; if he can win Georgia, then he'll clearly have won Indiana. If he wins Missouri, he'll have won Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The national background noise is louder -- more consequential -- for McCain than it is for Obama. We can some intuit some particular strategic insights: McCain will play more in some states than others. He doesn't have to worry about Obama winning Nevada and losing Ohio; in the McCain view, if Obama wins Ohio, he'll win Nevada, and the race is over.
Latest CNN Polls: Tight As Ticks In Four Battlegrounds
Here's the latest data dump from the -- and I'll paste it in because it hurts my fingers to type it all -- TNS Media Intelligence
Campaign Media Analysis Group (TNSMI/CMAG) and the University of Wisconsin
Advertising Project:
The campaigns are spending about
The campaigns are spending about $15m in ads per week; each is spending about $7.8 million. most of McCain's ads are paid for with both McCain campaign money and money from the RNC; 97% of Obama's ads are paid for by the candidate.
77% of the Obama campaigns' ads were deemed "negative," compared to 56% for McCain.
Here's TNSMI/CMAG's state-by-state tabulation:
Table 1: Advertising Spending by
State
McCain
Obama
Colorado
$553,000
$522,000
Florida
$1,040,000
$1,327,000
Iowa
$352,000
$148,000
Indiana
None
$263,000
Michigan
$761,000
$954,000
Minnesota
$472,000
$18,000
Missouri
$353,000
$504,000
Montana
None
$37,000
North Carolina
$245,000
$300,000
North Dakota
<$1,000
$22,000
New Hampshire
$225,000
$172,000
New Mexico
$214,000
$155,000
Nevada
$365,000
$297,000
Ohio
$812,000
$801,000
Pennsylvania
$1,612,000
$948,000
Virginia
$312,000
$868,000
Wisconsin
$487,000
$432,000
*
Money spent by the Obama campaign in Minnesota was in the Rochester market,which also covers parts of
northern Iowa.
Daily Polling Update
Watch for a new CBS News / New York Times poll out tonight and the first installment of the Hotline-Diageo weekly battleground state polls out tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the Hotline-Diageo tracker, sampling the views of 913 people over three days, gives Barack Obama and Joe Biden a narrow lead -- 45% to 42%.
Reuters/Zogby's latest national poll gives Obama a two point lead -- 47% to 45%.
Gallup's daily track isn't out yet. (Check back at 1:00 pm.)
What The Heck Is AIG, Part II?
Sen. John McCain has turned heel on an AIG bailout, after telling Matt Lauer on Tuesday that "we cannot have the taxpayers bail out AIG or anybody else."
Today, McCain's campaign issued this statement in his name:
"Today,
the government was forced to commit $85 billion to stop the collapse of AIG,
another in a growing series of events that includes Bear Stearns, Lehman
Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These actions stem from failed
regulation, reckless management, and a casino culture on Wall Street that has
crippled one of the most important companies in America. The focus of any such
action should be to protect the millions of Americans who hold insurance
policies, retirement plans and other accounts with AIG. We must not bailout the
management and speculators who created this mess. They had months of warnings
following the Bear Stearns debacle, and they failed to act."
"We
should never again allow the United States to be in this position. We need
strong and effective regulation, a return to job-creating growth and a
restoration of ethics and the social contract between businesses and America.
Important questions remain to be answered by Wall Street. Did executives
mislead investors and regulators about the severity of the problem? We must
investigate whether or not there was misrepresentation on part of the company
executives. If there was, there must be penalties. We need to change the way
Washington and Wall Street does business, and as President I will."
Did McCain not understand the severity of what an AIG collapse would mean yesterday? At the time he spoke, the government was trying to convince other banks to put together a loan for AIG, so perhaps he was anticipating a quasi-private solution.
What The Heck Is AIG, Part I?
Not the American Insurance Group, Obama statement-drafters! (It's the American International Group.)
A Tale Of Two Ads
On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Joe Scar and Mika mocked Obama's two minute ad and praised McCain's, mostly based on what they thought were
superior production values. McCain's ad has a punchline, it's slick, it contains a swipe at Obama -- all the usual ingredients.
Obama's 2-minute ad presents him as a candidate who is not going to
sugar coat things; his on-the-[hotel-suite] living-room-couch persona is very likeable; he
seems very relaxed, understanding, and quietly confident.
Will people tune in one ad and ignore the other?
Remember, Obama aired a two-minute ad just like this one a few days before the Iowa caucuses. Many Obama aides believed at the time that it pushed him over the edge because it made voters feel comfortable voting for Obama.
Feeling uncomfortable with Obama -- not knowing the cut of his jib, what's in his maw, all of that -- is the essential hurdle for him in this election. Even the McCain campaign admits, in quieter moments, that if voters feel comfortable voting for Obama, well, not even Sarah Palin can swing this election.
Atlantic Electoral Map: 9/17
Now weekly.
The distribution and categories are based on polling, historical trends, conversations with the campaigns, and the thoughts of smart analysts in those states. MARGINAL TOSS UPS -- states where historical voting patterns seem tobe asserting themselves but exogenous factors prevent the electorate from leaning to a particular candidate at this point. TRUE TOSS UPS -- states where historical voting patterns are not asserting themselves AND exogenous factors prevent the electorate from leaning.
Likely Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA (190 electoral votes)
New Mexico moves to lean-Obama based on the Obama campaign's confidence there and the relative lack of attention McCain is paying to the state.
Colorado, Nevada and Virginia are more competitive than they ought to be at this point.
New Hampshire moves to lean-Obama for meta-environmental reasons and because of the strength of his recent polling.
Florida remains a toss-up; the Obama campaign has a larger organization there, and McCain is underperforming along the I-4 corridor.
No reason just yet to move Montana into the tossup category.
The North Carolina Senate race is getting very competitive.
September 16, 2008
The Daily Bric-A-Brac: Projections And Projections And Projections
Check out this website from 3 Blue Dudes devoted to charting electoral college and other political projections. 55 websites project that Obama will win, 16 project than McCain will win, and 8 project a 269-269 tie.
Former McCain strategist John Weaver's customzied toolbar concern has a new client: the Dallas Cowboys.
On that sex-ed ad McCain ran, Byron York makes the case for why McCain was right and Obama isn't.
She'll sit down with Katie Couric on 9/29 and 9/30.
McCain: "Enough Is Enough"
A new ad that will air, according to the McCain campaign, nationwide.
The message: "I won't tolerate a system that puts you and your family at risk. Your savings, your jobs. I'll keep them safe."
The tag line: "experience and leadership in a time of crisis."
The visuals: stills of Wall Street with newspaper headline chyrons highlighting McCain's plans.
The content: It's been a while since we've seen this side of him, but McCain was once a populist. He opposed the Bush tax cuts on the grounds that they were tilted toward the rich. He supported a patients' bill of rights. He seemed to relish fighting big corporations who were unfairly gaming the system. Then he listened to advisers who urged him to become an orthodox Republican on the economy, and the past was forgotten. Now -- his rhetoric today is a bit much -- if, as the chairman of the commerce committee he indeed had some control over the levers of finance, he didn't do much....
Cognitive Dissonance And The Paranoid Style
Jonah Lehrer, who bangs out one of the better blogs about neuroscience, writes today about how evidence against a core belief can, in partisans, reinforce that corps belief, like when conservatives are given data showing that supply tax cuts really don't boost government coffers, or when liberals tend to discount data showing the success of welfare reform.
Are liberals and conservatives equally prone to succomb to this cognitive distortion? Lehrer, a liberal says yes:
The researchers argue that conservatives are particularly vulnerable to this cognitive flaw, as their beliefs tend to be more rigid and immutable. But I'm not so sure. As a liberal partisan hack, I'm very aware of how my political biases distort my processing of information. I fixate on news that jives with my beliefs and tend to ignore those inconvenient facts that contradict my inner talking points. .
Richard Hofstader wrote before the age of Tversky and Kahneman, but his wonderful essay about the paranoid style in American politics anticipates this effect explicitly:
One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.
Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina sort of digs deeper here, saying that Sen. John McCain (and Biden and Obama) can't run a major corporation either.
Well -- Palin has more executive experience than Sen. Obama, Sen. Biden and Sen. McCain combined, and she's managed billion-dollar budgets. By that resume, one would assume that, of the three, she'd be the most qualified to run a corporation, if we were electing a corporate CEO, which we're not.
Evidence that we're not: what Americans seem to want from their government right now is the credible, steady hand of a leader. A corporate CEO is in the White House, and no one pays him any heed.
Kentucky Democrat Uses McCain Speech Against McConnell
The ad begins by quoting Sen. John McCain at his convention: "We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption."
As soon as he says "some Republicans," the visual dissolves to a picture of Sen. Mitch McConnell...and alleges that McCain "singled out" Mitch McConnell on corruption. (He did this in 2002.)
The narrator: "McConnell voted for the infamous bridge to nowhere..."
McCain continues in the background...and the audio pots up when he says "change is coming," at which point Senate candidate Bruce Lunsford voice pops up: "I'm Bruce Lunsford, and I approve this message."
Tanning Association Defends Gov. Palin
"While partisan bloggers and the sun scare industry will use this as an opportunity to undermine Gov. Palin and demonize the indoor tanning industry, the fact is that Governor Palin's decision to get UV light from a tanning bed positively impacts her health."
The trackers: Hotline/Diageo has Obama-Biden by four now (46% to 42%) over a three-night sample. Gallup has a statistical dead heat (McCain-Palin 47% to Obama-Biden's 46%), with both polls showing stronger positive responses to Obama over the past two nights. In the Hotline poll, Obama has an 11 point advantage on the question of who would best handle the economic crisis. Rasmussen has McCain up by a point, and the DailyKos/Research 2000 track has Obama up by four.
Finally, one state poll of note:
Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey:
Obama: 49%. McCain 41%. (LV)
Obama: 49%. McCain: 38% (RV)
Fiorina Next To Be Thrown Under Bus?
Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiornia was asked whether she thought Sarah Palin was qualified to lead a company like HP. Here, courtesy of St. Louis's KTRS radio, is her answer:
HOST: "Do you think she has the experience to run a major company like Hewlett Packard?"
FIORINA: "No, I don't. But that's not what she's running for."
Holtz-Eakin Under The Bus
From a pool report filed by the Wall Street Journal's Elizabeth Holmes:
This is in response to Doug Holtz-Eakin's earlier comments during this morning's econ briefing, when asked about John McCain's accomplishments on the commerce committee.
Senior aide Matt McDonald said that the senator "laughed" when he heard the comment.
"He would not claim to be the inventor or anything, much less the BlackBerry. This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer,"
A Big E-Mail Meltdown
Can't e-mail out or get e-mail in.
If any McCain aides are reading this, please e-mail me at your convenience the text of Sen. McCain's remarks .... a populist barn-burner of a speech this early afternoon on the economy and Wall Street. The McCain of yore - full of indignation at corporate executives, full of promises about a muscular, efficient governmental regulatory apparatus. Missing entirely: those careful hedges (added in at the last moment) by advisers.
Can The Government Fix The Crisis?
As they grapple with the financial meltdown of 2008, Barack Obama and John McCain both promise more regulation and then dip down into their partisan bag of tricks and pull out the graying rabbits: tax cuts, spending discipline, etc. etc. Regulation might help prevent a similar crisis, the operative word being "might." The bubble began during the Clinton administration; Democrats and Republicans eagerly worked to unshackle investment banks in the late 1990s, although the regulatory philosophy that Democrats decry was encouraged even earlier; maybe the Fed didn't raise interest rates quickly enough in 2003; maybe the regulators missed signs that, in retrospect, they ought to have paid more attention to, although doing so might have shut down the economy.
And regulation won't fix anything now.
I talked to a few folks who are dealing with the crisis. As a neophyte, I asked some basic questions: what, exactly, is the problem...can the government fix it? If so, what can -- or should -- the government do?
The consensus is kind of scary. The government, right now, needs to deal with the immediate; they need to stabilize the situation and project confidence as they do. If AIG gets the $70b it needs to stay in business, maybe that'll be enough.
But the problem -- or "the problem" is that investment banks are paralyzed; they can't find counterparties; they can't lend money with monkeys on their backs. The monkeys, as I understand it, are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages. The risk doesn't disappear.
So -- basically -- the government has to take some of these things off the balance sheet, hold them for a while, and give the investment banks a clean slate.
If that sounds a lot like socialism -- like massive government intervention -- it is.
Project Two -- get the regular economy going again. Get people spending. Tax cuts might do it, but both parties are going to have get over their allergy to deficit spending.
The Panic of 2008
So what exactly does AIG do? And what does this have to do with the presidential race?
As I've been tutored to understand it, AIG is the a king of the reinsurance market, which means that it is a bearer to many risks that regular insurance companies don't want to hold. It has its hands in many pots -- for example, it is the biggest purchaser of aircraft from Boeing and Airbus -- the airlines don't like to own their assets.
AIG does well when, in aggregating and packaging risks, it invests them and see returns that are better than what their actual acturarial obligations are.
AIG has a trillion dollar balance sheet. If it goes under, a lot of insurance claims get frozen -- not what the economy needs right after a hurricane. Indeed, more than a trillion dollars gets frozen in the process of unwinding it all.
If AIG goes bankrupt, then the entire financial system could seize up, as firms would stop lending money. The next dominos to fall would be banks.
Your money is fine, your money is fine -- the FDIC guarantees all deposits up to $100,000. But if a major bank like Wachovia goes under, panic may ensue. The FDIC doesn't have an infinite resvervoir of cash -- it has something like $50 billion in reserves. If there's a major bank run, the treasury would have to give the FDIC more money -- or Congress would have to appropropiate it -- not sure how that works -- but really, the only think preventing a panic would be a political figure who people trust enough to listen to their counsel.
Right now, neither President Bush nor Congressional leaders have any credibility right now.
When John McCain says the fundamentals of the economy are strong, this is what he means. As long as no one panics, there is nothing to panic about. He is right, to a point. But his party lacks the standing to make these assurances.
The country trusts Democrats a bit more, but Barack Obama hasn't found a way to explain what's happening and to carefully spell out what government can do, what people should do, and what people should expect.
The political system is still playing catch up.
A Small Pro-McCain Trend In The Battleground States
Turns out that she's been contributing a post to BlogHer about once a month. Her topic today is "Fighting for Equal Pay." The posts are well-written, but they're a bit too campaign-language-y. That said, the BlogHer community seems to be pretty psyched about the posts, and more posts, I am told, are in the works.
Here's hoping that the campaign lets Michelle Obama be Michelle Obama -- as opposed to "Michelle Obama."
Mobile 9/15
Traveling back to DC, so, for the rest of the day, mobile twittering it will be.
The Greenberg Photographs
My colleagues have said what I would write anyway, but I would hope that the controversy does not obscure the article that Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, one that tells us more about John McCain's national security worldview than any other written in the cycle.
Don't Worry, Fox News Is Still Grilling Democrats
The Meltdown
Getting a handle on this meltdown of the nation's financial system is tough; most voters and even many political analysts -- I'll count myself in here -- don't really understand precisely what's happening and precisely when and how the dominos will topple in a way that we can percieve the consequences.
(a) voters, even those who consider themselves to be investors, probably don't understand what Lehman Brothers does -- did, or how an investment bank makes decisions on a daily basis. What they do hear is the name, which conjures up images of sturdiness and cash flow and orderly capitalism.
(b) The reinsurance market is also fairly complex; if AIG is the next concern to fail, what happens?
(c) Both McCain and Obama want tougher regulation, consolidated regulatory oversight boards and transparency, but it's not clear whether any of those things would have -- or even should have -- tempered the orgy of housing market speculation that led to this crisis.
(d) Both McCain and Obama have to strike a balance between acknowledging the crisis and using their authority to convince Americans not to run on their banks and head for the hills. That's what McCain was doing this morning when he said the "fundamentals" of the economy are strong; Obama will strike a different balance.
(e) Both McCain and Obama seem to agree that the government was correct to not have bailed out Lehman Brothers; both seem to agree that the government can't expose itself to too much risk.
Sign of the Times?
A Fox News anchor subjects a McCain campaign aide to fairly tough questions about Obama's tax record; to wit; is it true that Obama plans to raise taxes on the middle class?
The McCain campaign's response to this is to question Obama's track record on taxes; do we really think he'd stop at the wealthy?
Obama Camp: McCain's "Strong" Fundamentals An "Enormous" Mistake
The Obama campaign will seize on comments John McCain made at an event in Florida this morning to portray the Republican ticket as fundamentally out of touch with American voters.
McCain, speaking before a town hall meeting, said that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" before adding the caution that "these are very, very difficult times and I promise you we will never put America in this position again."
An Obama aide calls the first part of McCain's sentence "an enormous mistake," and said that the campaign will seek to amplify the comment through surrogates, principles and maybe even television ads.
What We Learned This Weekend
External Events Drive Elections -- Forget strategy and tactics, it's events, like hurricanes, and how campaigns respond to events, that drive elections in the fall.
The Po-Mo Campaign -- The McCain campaign has gone thoroughly post-modern on us! Truth? Schmuth? It's all a struggle for power. And if the Obama campaign agrees with the media on a certain truth, it might be suspect. (The artificial construction employed by the McCain campaign here is that if the media wants to agree with the Obama campaign, well, go ahead.)
Some former administration officials will admit that one of the biggest coneptual flaws of the Bush administration was to treat the truth as a fudgable convenience; confidence isolated decision-makers; when real things happened -- Katrina, say -- rhetoric didn't exactly do the job.
The Obama campaign remains convinced that McCain isn't paying a penalty for delberately, knowingly and willfully misleading people.
The Press Has Turned -- The press has decided that McCain's distortions are more consequential than Obama's distortions, and they are calling McCain out for them. A "narrative" has been created. This turn has been accompanied by cheers from the pundit class that Obama has gotten meaner. Conservative activists may retrench.
Sarah Palin Needs Practice -- America's gut reaction to Sarah Palin has been positive, and so her stumbles during the Charlie Gibson interview might not really settle in. Forget the Bush doctrine: did Palin's preppers really not give her a crisp answer about how a McCain administration would differ from a Bush administration? Her knowledge of policy seemed to be an inch deep, making even Republicans even inside the McCain campaign nervous.
She did not come off as a credible vice president. The McCain campaign knows it, despite their spin, and the murder boards will continue.
There were rumors that she'd challenge Joe Biden to an early debate just to prove her bonafides. Ah, no.
Republicans Nervous About McCain Tactics -- Karl Rove is, and Steve Schmidt -- who is not a Rove acolyte -- probably couldn't care less.
Republicans Believe They Can Win -- Not a dirty little s
ecret, but there probably isn't a single Republican strategist now -- ok, maybe a few -- who doesn't believe that if McCain had picked Romney or Pawlenty, the election would be over.
Obama Doesn't Like Playing Mean -- When Obama is commanded to roll in the mud, he seems uncomfortable, annoyed and unsure of itself. And it doesn't usually work, because people pick up on his mixed internal dialogue. Now -- does that mean his campaign hasn't attacked McCain? Course not. They went after his age last week. It just means that Obama isn't comfortable being the heavy. Today, Joe Biden debuts a new speech in Michigan. It'll be heavy.
The Media Has Awful Obama Fundraising Sources -- Every month, we predict he's having trouble raising money. Everytime we do, we're wrong.
September 11, 2008
Gone Mobile
Posts will be sporadic over the next few days, but I'll be twittering instead.
GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?
PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO
ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to
be called upon and help.
But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this
point and I think that we need to -- especially with new leadership
coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got
to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of
those NATO members.
We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.
GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States,
Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to
invade.
PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that
are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant
against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a
larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.
And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the
support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is
economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.
It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as
I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure,
again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of
keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control
and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.
His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming
from and through Russia, that's a dangerous position for our world to
be in, if we were to allow that to happen.
CHARLIE GIBSON: Governor, let me start by asking you a question that I asked John
McCain about you, and it is really the central question. Can you look the country
in the eye and say "I have the experience and I have the ability to be not
just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?" SARAH PALIN: I do, Charlie, and on January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in,
if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, we'll be ready.
I'm ready. GIBSON: And you didn't say to yourself, "Am I experienced enough? Am I
ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I -- will I feel
comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?" PALIN: I didn't hesitate, no. GIBSON: Didn't that take some hubris? PALIN: I -- I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness
and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so
committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and
victory in the war, you can't blink. So I didn't blink then even when asked to
run as his running mate.
ABC News Flashes...
EXCLUSIVE: GOV. SARAH PALIN WARNS WAR MAY BE NECESSARY IF RUSSIA INVADES ANOTHER COUNTRY
Obama Team And Dem Establishment Work To Bridge A Gap, And Ickes Now Thinks Obama Can Win
There is an affect gap between how members of the Democratic political establishment view the presidential race right now -- concerns, bordering on panic -- and where Barack Obama's campaign brain trust thinks the race is at -- a mix of confidence and sobriety, but nothing approaching rank worrying.
This gap has a lineage. Jimmy Carter's Atlanta campaign headquarters and the National Democrats had their moments, as did the National Dems and Bill Clinton's Little Rock headquarters. Both sides argued, then fought, and then drew insights from each other, and Democrats managed to win the White House. (1988...and 2000...were a little different).
Call this first group National Democrats. They see 55 days left, an Obama campaign dropping in national polls, an enthusiastic Republican base, a public that, darn it, seems to like Sarah Palin, an Obama campaign that can't figure out how to respond to a changed dynamic, and, on top of all of that, millions left to raise.
Chicago Democrats notice that John McCain is doing better in traditionally Republican states outside of the West; that an engaged Republican base changes the map, that Obama is winning right now in every state that John Kerry won plus Iowa and New Mexico, and that the remaining electoral votes he needs could come from Nevada. Or Colorado. Or Montana. Or Virginia. The fundamentals are strong; the election will turn back to the economy; everything is OK. The campaign is about Barack Obama versus John McCain, and on November 4, it will be about Barack Obama and John McCain.
Every few weeks, former Sen. Tom Daschle, now a close confidant of Obama's, convenes a passel of charter members of the Democratic political establishment in his office conference room Washington. Daschle usually brings along a guest from the Obama campaign's upper echelon. The guest briefs; the lobbyists, politicians and consultants talk politics.
The participants included Sen. John Kerry, former Indiana Rep. Tom
Roemer, and James Johnson -- all Obama allies -- and former Michigan
Gov. James Blanchard and lobbyist
Michael Berman and and superlawyer Robert Barnett -- all supporters of
Hillary Clinton in the primary.
Today's meeting, described by several who attended, began with a well-received briefing by deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand. State by state, he took the group through the campaign's battleground strategy, made note of its budget assumptions (the campaign is ahead of its goals, he said) and bragged about a well-oiled turnout machine. Even Democrats outside of Chicago are confident that the Obama field operation will be gangbusters, thanks in large part to Hildebrand's efforts over the past year.
The National Democrats wanted to know: why is the campaign focusing on Sarah Palin? Why does Obama seem defensive?
They were told not to panic.
One lobbyist got angry, calling the campaign "arrogant;" another archly wondered why an Obama fundraiser was suddenly asking Democrats in DC to raise more than $25 million for what the campaign hopes will be a quick reaction fund for direct mail pieces in states. (The meeting wasn't a fundraising pitch and lobbyists can't contribute or raise money.)
Those exchanges led some folks who attended to describe the meeting as "tense," but others, including Hildebrand and Clinton strategist Harold Ickes, disagree.
Hildebrand describes the meeting as "most helpful."
"I love these people and they've always had nothing but
constructive ideas for the campaign," he said. "It did not get testy."
He said he gave out his e-mail to the 85 people who attended, and in the few hours since the meeting, many have already e-mailed him with thoughts.
Incidentally: it is credible that she knows more about some aspects of energy policy than Sen. Joe Biden.
Phil Singer Has A Blog
The outspoken, unvarnished former spokesperson for Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer is now blogging. Singer, who now consults for the DSCC, posts advice for Charlie Gibson, the Democrats, and the Obama campaign, among others. Check it out!
USSS Code Names: Biden and Palin
Biden's is "Celtic." His USSS detail doesn't seem to be certain if it's "Celtic" as in the basketball team or "Celtic" with a hard K.
And the Palin family has chosen the letter D: Denali for her, Driller for him, according to Anne Kornblut.
Outing these code names doesn't harm anyone, no worries, although the campaigns, having had the Secret Service emphasize operational security procedures to them ad nauseum, have asked staff members not to talk about these things.
Quantifying The Enthusiasm For Sarah Palin
The huge crowds Gov. Sarah Palin attracts are one thing, but enthusiasm about the Alaska governor has produced an outpouring of volunteers for the GOP's get-out-the-vote program.
According to a Republican official, countywide, seven to ten times as many new volunteers are signing to help as compared to the same days a month ago.
The day McCain announced the pick, and the Wednesday and Thursday of the convention, the numbers were through the roof, dwarfing the number of new volunteer sign-ups during that same period in 2004.
That's more people that GOP field planners assumed they'd have, so in some areas, they're scrambling to figure out what to do with them all.
Biden's Secret Service Code Name...
Yes, it really is one of these....
Where They Stand
Maybe I'm just being a toady for CBS News, which pays me as a consultant, but for those of you who want long television segments devoted to the issues, you could do a lot worse than One down, 34 more to go.... One note: the executive producer of the evening news is Rick Kaplan. He's no shrinking violet, which means that he won't put bad pieces on the air, which means that CBS folks have figured out a way to talk about the issues that actually translates into good television. (Another network innovation I loved was how ABC News incorporated issue segments in their New Hampshire debate broadcasts this year.)
A Palindrome
A reader suggests a real palindrome that also happens to be one of those banned words:
What McCain thinks Democrats want to do:
Harass selfless
Sarah
In Michigan, More Anti-Obama Phone Calls
Another negative messaging call in Michigan, also from Opinion Access Corp, a phone bank firm on Long Island run by Joe "Para Gringo" Rafael.
I am a student at the University of Michigan. While visiting my
parents, who also live in Ann Arbor, I received a phone call from the
Opinion Access Corp. Afterward while I was looking for information
about the Opinion Access Corp I found your article on push polling in
Ohio. The questions were basically the same as were reported in the
email from Jared Littleton, but here are a few extra details:
The pollster asked to talk to the youngest male over the age of 18 in
the household.
After asking the questions he asked if there were any children under
the age of 18 in the household.
Also claimed that Barack voted against the protection of the privacy
of sex abuse victims, voted for the release of sex offenders from
jail, and voted for needle exchanges.
The company has conducted field work for legitimate entities, and it doesn't seem to have an ideological inclination. Recently, the firm surveyed evangelicals in the South.
Update, from reader D: "I got the same push poll, very slick, in PA a couple of weeks ago. Or
something very similar. A long setup that was clearly pro-McCain, but not egregious until the softening-up was over and the stuff about Wright and that crap came up."
September 10, 2008
The Daily Bric-A-Brac: I So Enjoy The Ghawker Website
Daily tracks: Hotline/Diageo is at 45-45, Gallup is at 48-43. Fox News has McCain at 45 and Obama at 42 among registered voters. CNN/OPR has Obama by six in Michigan, Obama by six in New Hampshire, McCain by five in Missouri and McCain by five in Virginia.
The Fowler family...follies? First, ex-DNC chairman Don Fowler joked about God favoring the Democrats because a hurricane interrupted the start of the Republican campaign. Now, the Politico reports that Carol Khare Fowler reduces Palin's resume to her deciding not to have an abortion.
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an
explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her
startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female
qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow
able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho
futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and
leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since
Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich
and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy,
victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
The U.S. government in bed with big oil. Literally.
A Kinsleyian Moment For Biden?
Anti-Obama Push Polling In Ohio?
Note: to be a push-poll, negative message-testing calls have to be placed in a certain volume; hence the ability to "push" a message. See more here.
But this call sounds very suspect. Jared Littleton, a student in Columbus, Ohio e-mails the following:
"...just
got off the phone with a polling company. While I do not know that I
can technically define their questions as a push poll, the company, Opinion
Access, was definitely testing negative statements about Barack Obama to
see if it would sway my vote. They began with baseline questions to
determine my support for Obama, and th[e]n proceeded to read/refer to the
following issues to see if it would make me more or less likely to vote for
him (or I could say that I wouldn't believe it):
Spiritual advisor
said American brought the 2001 attacks on itself voted against requiring
schools to install monitoring software for pornography
Obama's spiritual
advisor stated that US created HIV to kill people of color has voted to
restrict 2nd amendment rights
voted against toughening policies against
gang members
only legislator that refused to support legislation that would
force adult stores to not be near schools or churches
voted for sex
education for kindergartners born alive education
They then re-asked
the initial baseline questions to see if my support for Obama had changed
at all.
While I may have missed a couple of the issue questions, I
think I wrote down the vast majority. The statement regarding the
software monitoring and the adult stores were the only items I have never
heard before.
The poll[s]er would not indicate what campaign these
questions were being asked as a part of. ....
Has anyone else gotten calls like these?
McCain Memo Defends Palin On Bridge, Earmarks
The McCain campaign doesn't respect the media, doesn't particularly care to feed the media, but they can't help but attempting to set the record straight in a traditional way: the blast memo. Now -- it seem fairly clear now that Palin did not oppose the Bridge to Nowhere when doing so would have damaged her standing politically, and certainly did not oppose Congress. McCain has a good record on earmarks; Palin's is undeniably mixed.
TO: Interested Parties
RE: Smear Machine Rolls On: Governor Palin And Earmarks
DATE: September 10, 2008
"Gov. Palin recently cancelled the Gravina Island Bridge near Ketchikan that would have connected the Alaska mainland with Gravina Island (population: 50)."
-- Alaska Democratic Party
Over the last few days, the Obama campaign has politically maneuvered to attack Governor Sarah Palin for killing a controversial project -- the "Bridge to Nowhere." This maneuvering has been skillful in light of Barack Obama's record of requesting nearly $1 billion in earmarks and actually voting to support the "Bridge to Nowhere" himself. It is no wonder that the Obama campaign would seek to distort the facts because Governor Palin is someone who will stand in the way of Barack Obama's wasteful earmark spending habits.
Please find the facts below:
·Despite the Obama campaign's claims, Governor Palin consistently opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere" once she was in office and officially stopped it. In December 2006, Governor Palin proposed her first budget for Alaska which included no state funding for the "Bridge to Nowhere." As she said at the time, "We have a limited pot of money, of course, and we need to make wise, sensible choices." In a report prepared by her transition team, the "Bridge to Nowhere" was criticized "as a severe drain on resources." Furthermore, the report concluded that the State's transportation plan relied too heavily on federal earmarks. The final 2007 budget contained no state funding for the "Bridge to Nowhere." In 2007, Governor Palin killed the bridge project.
·The Democrats' claim that the project was only canceled after federal funding dried up is also wrong. The money was left with the state to decide whether to spend money on the "Bridge to Nowhere" or other projects. Governor Palin could have decided to spend money on the "Bridge to Nowhere" but instead canceled the project.
·Congressional Quarterly: "It Is Not Inaccurate For Palin To Say She 'Stopped The Bridge To Nowhere.'" "She ended up firmly against it. And while there may have been other contributing factors, it is not inaccurate for Palin to say she 'stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.'" (Jonathan Allen, "Four Things You Need To Know About The 'Bridge To Nowhere,'" CQ, 9/9/08)
·Non-Partisan PolitiFact.com: "It's True That On Sept. 21, 2007, Palin Officially Killed The Project."(St. Petersburg Times/CQ'sPolitiFact.com, "On Support For The Bridge To Nowhere," Politifact.com)
·Even According To The Alaska Democrat Party, Governor Palin Killed The "Bridge to Nowhere." Before they switched their website, the Alaska Democrat Party said, "Gov. Palin recently cancelled the Gravina Island Bridge near Ketchikan that would have connected the Alaska mainland with Gravina Island (population: 50)."
·Of all the presidential candidates, Barack Obama has the longest track record of supporting the "Bridge to Nowhere" -- he supported it before Sarah Palin even ran for governor. In 2005, Barack Obama voted for the final Highway Reauthorization Bill that included $223 million for the "Bridge to Nowhere." Unlike John McCain who instantly highlighted the "Bridge to Nowhere" in a press release the day the bill was passed, Barack Obama did not have the political courage to stand up to wasteful earmarks and only did when he started to run for president. Barack Obama's most egregious support for the "Bridge to Nowhere" came in October 2005 when he voted against stripping $125 million in funding from the bridge to fund rebuilding a bridge in New Orleans. When Governor Palin was presented with a similar choice, she chose to kill the bridge. When Barack Obama had to choose, he voted to build the bridge.
·Governor Palin ordered her administration to cut down on the number of federal earmark requests. In December 2007, Governor Palin order her administration to seek fewer congressional earmarks. Governor Palin did this recognizing that the state needed to improve its credibility after several scandalous earmarks such as the "Bridge to Nowhere." As Governor Palin's budget director said, "We really want to skinny it down." Governor Palin directed that earmark requests be made only out of compelling need and if they have a strong national purpose. As the Anchorage Daily News wrote at the time, Governor Palin's order is "appropriate and realistic" and "prudent."
·Earmark reform has been a leading source of tension between Governor Palin and Alaska's Congressional Delegation. In March 2008, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) -- known for his ability to bring back the pork -- said that Governor Palin's earmark efforts had led to questions about why the Alaska delegation was seeking "things that state doesn't want." As Senator Stevens said, "It is a difficult thing to get over right now, the feeling that we don't represent Alaska because Alaska doesn't want earmarks."
·Under Governor Palin, the number of earmarks requested by the Governor's Office has fallen by $150 million. From $350 million in earmarks requested by her predecessor, the total amount of earmarks requested by Governor Palin's office has fallen to $197 million. It is IMPORTANT to note that several news reports have confused earmark requests from Senator Ted Stevens and earmark requests that originated from the governor's office. Some news reports have attributed all of the earmark requests from Alaska and its congressional delegation to Governor Palin. This is wrong and purposely deceiving.
·As Alaska's chief executive, Governor Palin has vetoed nearly $500 million in wasteful spending. In 2007, Governor Palin vetoed $231 million in government projects in what the Anchorage Daily News said "may be the biggest single-year line-item veto total in state history." As she said at the time, "We need to live within our means. ... Even though we have a surplus, that doesn't warrant a spending spree on an unlimited credit card." In 2008, Governor Palin vetoed $268 million in government projects.
·While Governor Palin was cutting wasteful projects, Barack Obama was requesting nearly $1 billion. In just three years in office, Barack Obama requested nearly $1 billion in earmarks - over a million dollars per working day. Barack Obama's pork record has earned him the ire of Citizens Against Government Waste and the Club for Growth.
First reported by Todd Beeton at MyDD, a source close to Hillary Clinton says that Sen. Barack Obama telephoned her last night to thank her for fighting the good fight. (Perhaps he also got some tips about what it's like to have dinner with Bill Clinton, as Obama's doing later in the week.)
A Third Option For The Media
Reader D:
Um, how about a third option, which perhaps could be called the "Gore
option," where news outlets start describing McCain himself as being "mean
and duplicitious" and no longer the wonderful Maverick that so many fell in
love with in '00? Where the media starts talking about the character of the
candidate, not just his spinner? (Not that I agreed with it in '00 when it
happened to Gore but...)
It's clear that many of his previous fans in the media (exhibit A: Joe
Klein) are turning on him because of his campaign. Does his campaign kinda
sorta call into question the man himself and his whole "man of honor" when
it's turning into the Lee Atwater all-star show?
NRA Hits Obama: He'd Be The Most "Anti-Gun President" Ever
According to a National Rifle Association official, four million NRA members will get the following brochure to share with their friends and family. It's the first of the gun group's major persuasion efforts.
The NRA's political victory fund will also send this "fact sheet" them to gun stores, gun shows and wherever gun owners and hunters congregate.
Six million brochures have been printed.
The Palin Enthusiasm
Say this for the ticket: 23,000 people showed up to hear Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. John McCain speak in Fairfax, CO, VA.
When Palin starts to campaign by herself, will McCain see the same crowds?
Will Palin ever really campaign by herself?
And Barack Obama's now the one focused on finding small audiences and doing town halls.
Some Banned Word Possibilities
Reader C: John McCain has been imPalin' Obama since his vice presidential selection?
Me: Too sexual to be banned, and besides, the New York Post would have no way to write a headline.
Reader D: "I'd say all past and future VP picks Palin comparison,
wouldn't you?
Me: Sigh.
Reader H: suggests "palingenesis"? - "In Stoic philosophy, a great conflagration that
marks the end of one world and the birth of another. Translated in the
New Testament as 'the renewal of all things.'"
Me: That one I like.
Coolest Cat Rules
Here's another way of looking at the universe, which, since the LHC has been turned on, might just fracture into two or three or a million universes anyway.
Voters like the cool cat candidate. They favor the understated tortoise over the hyper hare.
It tells you plenty that McCain feels he has to used paid ads
to inoculate Sarah Palin right now.
The press has concluded that McCain is unfair and Obama is fair; the press may rally to Obama's side. (Mark Salter reads this and say, "What else is new?" Dan Pfeiffer reads this and says, "Yeah, right.")
Keyser Soze Rules
Don't know how many McCain campaign HQ operatives actually went to bed last night thinking that Barack Obama had offended the dignity of Gov. Sarah Palin by comparing her to swine, but when they awoke this morning to ad nauseum coverage of Obama's comments, they must have grinned.
Media entities could have had an internal conversation along the lines of: "This is stupid; let's cover the education stuff." Instead, news outlets are either giving McCain evil-genuis points for turning a nothing into a something, or are calling out the McCain campaign for being mean and duplicitous, but in any event, voters on the periphery of the conversation only hear enough to hear the accusations anyway.
If this is the dynamic from here on out -- each day dominated by an
outrageous accusation by the McCain campaign, and Obama forced to
defend against each outrageous claim, well, Obama is probably going to lose. The story McCain is telling -- that Obama is scary and dangerous -- may well be the
dominant storyline for the next 55 days. Obama's story is much simpler: We want change. I am change. McCain is more of the same. He who gets to tell his story will win.
Also banning: Palinmentum. Palinozoic.Palinize me.
"Astonishingly Inured..." Truth, Lies, The Media And Politics
I'm not prepared to answer Glenn Greenwald, in part because doing so would require a book's worth of prep, but a bit of introspection into one of the finer points of the debate won't hurt anyone, right?
So why are some voters inured to charges of deceit? How do mendacious politicos get away with it?
A few theories:
One: partisans are lost causes, but enough independent, undecided voters have been exposed for years and years to the press corps' doctrine of equivalence, which holds that charges are simply one possible account of the truth and are always paired with a countercharge. He said, she said.
Two: perhaps these voters are political postmodernists and don't put much faith in truth claims.
Three: perhaps the media -- hereby defined as a single entity consisting of the collective mindset of reporters, editors, producers, writers and pundits working for broadcast nets, cable news nets, TV News magazines, radio news nets, entertainment news mags, online nonpartisan news media, online partisan news media, print magazines, national newspapers like the USA Today, online newspapers like the Politico, Matt Drudge, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, local TV news, local talk radio, national talk radio, the Netroots, Belo, Hearst-Argyle, Clear Channel, the Rightroots, the nutroots, hyperlocal citizen journalists and corporate news executives -- has failed to create a coherent narrative about the truth that -- I hasten to add -- neatly fits with an ideological worldview.
A thinner claim here is that the media has failed to be advocates for the truth, particularly when the truth is discernable.
Perhaps it's the Republicans who lie more and the media fails to note this; perhaps it's the Democrats who lie more and the media fails to note this. (Has anyone figured out how to figure out whether Democrats lie more often or more consequentially than Republicans? Republicans more often or more consequentially than Democrats?)
Perhaps both sides distort the truth, but the media is afraid to expose the side that, given the situation, distorts more. Left-wing activists don't like Mark Halperin, but Halperin, as ABC News's Political Director, urged the news division in 2004 to pay more attention to the Bush campaign's distortions of John Kerry's record because those distortions were, in Halperin's view, more egregious and more fundamentally influential on how people viewed Kerry.
Is John McCain's quest for victory a reflection of an antiquated pre-Vietnam
mind-set? Or of a commitment to principles we abandon at our peril? Is
there any war McCain thinks can't be won? The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg writes on Sen. John McCain's wars for October's cover story. The excerpt below introduces the reader to a thinker whose ideas and policies may well be adopted by a President McCain.
...
"We know that there will never be in our lifetimes a celebration
like V-J Day," McCain said. "I don't know of any enemy we face, or
possible adversary, where there's a clear-cut victory. In Iraq, we will
withdraw with honor, and the troops will come home, and there are other
conflicts--in Afghanistan, over time, we'll grow an army--but there will
be no church bells ringing all over America and prayers of thanksgiving
in cathedrals."
Is this because of the nature of modern America?
"It's the nature of the adversary," he said.
Two aspects of his answer were interesting to me: his conscious use of the term withdraw with honor, with its explicit echo of Vietnam; and his equally explicit echo of an idea advanced by Philip Bobbitt, a Columbia law professor and former member of President Clinton's National Security Council, who argues in his new book, Terror and Consent,
that the struggle against terrorism is in fact a war but that, unlike
with previous wars, we will not know when this war is over.
McCain calls Terror and Consent "the best book I've ever read
on terrorism." He has been carrying it with him this campaign season,
showing underlined passages to his staff and to reporters, and he
invited Bobbitt to fly with him for two days. Terror and Consent
was recommended to him by Henry Kissinger, for understandable reasons:
Kissinger, a foreign-policy "realist," embraces Bobbitt's argument that
the so-called Bush Doctrine is "incoherent" because its call for the
democratization of Arab states undermines another of its principles,
the need to "preclude" states from acquiring weapons of mass
destruction. "When we try to square the circle by connecting the means
offered by the doctrine (unilateral action, preemption of the
acquisition of WMD, counterterrorism) to its ends (promoting
democracy), the doctrine falls apart," Bobbitt writes. "It is highly
implausible that the president intended to suggest that the U.S. would,
or should, use preemptive military strikes to impose democracy, or that
democracy, whether imposed or not, supplies a check on proliferation,
terrorism, or ethnic cleansing."
Bobbitt, like McCain, is also a stern critic of the Bush
administration's endorsement of torture, and of what he called, in an
interview with me, its "disregard" for the law. "Rather than seeking
legal reform" to address the new challenges of terrorism, Bobbitt
writes in his book, "the U.S. has used the inadequacy of the currently
prevailing law as a basis for avoiding legal restrictions on government
entirely."
The most controversial of Bobbitt's assertions is that the absence
of actual stores of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq does not
undermine the need for America to "preclude"--he prefers preclude to preempt--certain countries from developing WMDs in the future. Bobbitt writes:
The war against a global terror network, al Qaeda, is in an early
phase. Yet already owing to the Coalition invasion of Iraq, terrorists
from this network or any other cannot someday call on Saddam Hussein to
supply them covertly with weapons with which to attack the West when he
would not have dared to have done so directly, and when he, but not
they, had the resources to buy into a clandestine market in WMD.
The view of most Democrats, of course, is that the American
experience in Iraq has almost fatally undercut the doctrine of
preemption. Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and a
former Army officer, who traveled with Obama to Iraq in July, said of
McCain: "I think he's ignoring the consequences of Iraq. First of all,
the intelligence and the arguments for Iraq have been proven
universally wrong. The logic now is, 'It doesn't really matter if there
are no facts to support this operation, because there's always a chance
that a country could go bad.' I think this is totally unpersuasive as a
matter of logic or strategy. The other test of Iraq is that it has cost
us strategically. Iran is a much more influential country because of
the Iraq invasion." He went on, "You can justify practically any
military operation, not based on the facts of the moment but on what
might happen years from now."
The Large Hadron Collider Did Not Destroy The Universe
Unless it did, and I'm writing from a parallel universe.
Hasn't found the Higgs boson yet. Secrets of the universe still secret.
September 9, 2008
Obama Did Not Call Sarah Palin A Pig
The first McCain truthsquadding telephone call is taking place right now, and ex-MA Gov. Jane Swift is complaining about an idiom Barack Obama used today:
Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin's new "change" mantra.
"You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It's still a pig."
"You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink."
"We've had enough of the same old thing."
Suddenly, common analogies are sexist?
The McCain campaign has little respect for Obama, but they don't think
he is stupid. And the only way one can conclude that Obama meant to
refer to Gov. Sarah Palin as a pig is to have concluded that Obama is
as dumb as a doornail.
Obama is fond of this particular phrase. To wit, in 2007:
'I think that both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are capable people who have been given an impossible assignment,' Sen. Barack Obama said yesterday in a telephone interview. 'George Bush has given a mission to General Petraeus, and he has done his best to try to figure out how to put lipstick on a pig.
McCain criticized Democratic contenders for offering what he called costly universal health-care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's plan, he said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the 1990s.
"I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," he said of her proposal.
Sex Returns To The Campaign
New rule: if I'm not entirely confident that an advertising buy is real, I'm not going to link to it. Yes, you can easily find it elsewhere. But consider it a tiny moral protest against video press releases.
Now then -- the McCain campaign insists that, unlike other provocative "ads" they've run, their newest dilly of pickle is going to run in several states for a while.
Basically, the ad links Barack Obama with sex-ed for kindergartners. It implies that Obama favors teaching these kids dirrrty, explicity, sexual things. The bill in question -- never passed, by the way -- was intended to sanction the teaching of basic boundary lessons to young children, as in: if someone touches you or makes you uncomfortable, tell an adult. Those who oppose this believe that parents ought to be the ones imparting those lessons, so it's not entirely a non-issue.
But the gap between the implication (Obama has liberal, radical views about sexuality) and the reality in this ad is pretty big and fairly consequential.
The question now is whether cable news outlets will help the McCain campaign by running the ad -- or, if the ad crosses the line of taste, help Obama by running the ad.
For the Obama campaign's part, Bill Burton's response provocatively uses the word "perverse":
"It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain
campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual
predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father
of two young girls - a position that his friend Mitt Romney also
holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn't
define what honor was. Now we know why."
CBS News Undecided Sample: A Third Have Decided
One of the cooler polls out there is the CBS News monthly survey of a panel of undecided voters -- the same panel of undecided voters are surveyed each month. The data tells us why folks decide and when they decide and who they decide to support.
So far, about a third of the panel has made up their minds -- 20% for McCain and 14% for Obama. In the past month, the McCain-Obama split was roughly 60/40. The rest are still mulling their options.
The voters who decided recently view Gov. Palin more favorably than Sen. Biden by about 20 points -- and they seem to feel as if they know her a lot better than they know Biden. Among the currently undecided voters, Obama is doing better -- 72% say they can relate to him, about twice the number who say they can relate to McCain. But a full 82% of these voters think McCain is prepared to be president; just 31% think Obama is. Here's what CBS News says about the demographics:
Voters who remain uncommitted are more likely to be women (55%).46% describe themselves as independents. 48% say they are moderates.53% are age 45 or older. Some of these voters support one of the candidates, but their support is not yet firm.
The Daily Bric-A-Brac: Palinopoly
That word is banned, too.
The tracks: Hotline-Diageo has McCain at 45 and Obama at 44 from Sept. 6-8. Gallup gives McCain a five point lead, 49 to 44.
The new NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll shows the race tied.
CBS News's panel survey of undecided voters comes out tonight...
CBS News's I-Team has an e-mail Sarah Palin once wrote wherein she justifies raising taxes.
Ron Paul's Secret Event
Ron Paul's holding a press conference at the National Press Club tomorrow.
He'll reveal a big secret, he says.
A third party run? Endorsing Barr-Baldwin? Endorsing McCain-Palin? I don't know.
Any guesses?
A hint? He did qualify for the ballot in Montana....
DNC/Obama Operatives Flood Into Anchorage? They Say No.
Mike Gehrke, the DNC's research chief, e-mails to say that Democratic staffers have not traveled en masse to Alaska to join the Sarah Palin hunt.
"Not a single person from DC or Chicago has traveled to Alaska to do research," he writes.Not a single Obama staffer, not a DNC staffer, not a hired gun, he says.
Local Democratic operatives are helping out, and Obama has a field office open, he said, but John Fund's report of an "army" of 30 officials being airlifted to Alaska are false.
It's no surprise, then, that Democrats have airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage, the state capital Juneau and Mrs. Palin's hometown of Wasilla to dig into her record and background. My sources report the first wave arrived in Anchorage less than 24 hours after John McCain selected her on August 29.
Gehrke calls the above paragraph a "flat-out absolute fabrication. We have sent absolutely zero people."
McCain Campaign Stands Up Palin Truth-Squadding Team
The McCain campaign is standing up a truth-squadding operation designed to push what they deem as "smears" about Gov. Sarah Palin out of circulation.
The team, headquartered in Arlington, includes Mark Paoletta, a former chief counsel for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Edward O'Callaghan, a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District, and Brian Jones, a GOP strategist and former RNC research director. Jones, who stepped down as the campaign's communications director last June, and Paoletta, who became a senior adviser to the campaign in August, are volunteers; O'Callaghan is on staff.
The campaign plans to announce the team's existence today in the wake of a report by John Fund about Democratic operatives and lawyers scouring Anchorage for dirt about Palin.
"We're meeting it head on," said Brian Rogers, a campaign spokesperson.
The campaign will dispatch high-profile surrogates -- mostly women -- to combat false info in the press, and the campaign will send "truth squad alerts" as warranted.
Along with validated claims -- that Palin sought and obtained earmarks, that she didn't initially oppose the Bridge to Nowhere, that she raised sales taxes as mayor of Wasilla, that she maintained a working relationship with Sen. Ted Stevens, plenty of inaccurate information has spread , including charges that cut special needs funding (she didn't), was a Buchananite (not true), that she wanted to mandate the teaching of creationism in Alaska public schools (she said that it didn't have to be taught alongside evolution, although she didn't oppose it), that her pastor was a Jew for Jesus (a guest pastor at the church was, not her regular pastor), that she was a member of the Alaska Independence Party (her husband was) and that she covered up her daughter's pregnancy (Nope.) Partisans are currently litigating a slew of other incidents: did Palin want to ban books in Wasilla? No books were banned, but a "rhetorical" question was asked. Did Palin overstep her authority in pressuring a subordinate to fire a former relative? That's pending. Among many others. The battle to define Palin will probably last through the election.
The team reports directly to chief strategist Steve Schmidt.
A full list of the GOP truthsquadders can be found after the jump.
"I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there's joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?"
It's kind of a too-easy, doesn't-really-need-to-be-made gotcha point -- like when some Democrats claim that Bristol Palin is a walking example of why Gov. Palin's approach to sex education doesn't work. The point has been scored, but the logic is not sound and the politics is fishy.
Now -- some may find Biden's musings to be injurious to common manners, but Palin's work-life-family balance has been a conspicuous part of her appeal. A McCain campaign spokesman:
Barack Obama's running mate sunk to a new low today launching an offensive debate over who cares more about special needs children. Playing politics with this issue is disturbing and indicative of a desperate campaign.
Whenever a campaign charges that a rival has "sunk to a new low," I always wonder: where was the old low? And who put it there?
Old Obama Talking Points On Gov. Palin
On 8/30, the Obama campaign sent these talking points about Gov. Sarah Palin to surrogates. As Obama has taken a more aggressive tack, new TPs have been promised (not true, say those in the know); in any event, none have yet been sent out.
**NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION**
Talking Points on Sarah Palin
August 30, 2008
What does Palin's selection say about the kind of President John McCain will be?
What does his selection of Governor Sarah Palin say about the kind of President John McCain would be?
What does it say that he knuckled under to the right-wing of his party, who angrily threatened to veto McCain's preferred candidates, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, for their pro-choice views?
What does it say that, in order to satisfy the Right, he hastily selected someone he barely knew-and had only met once to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency?
What does it say that, after spending months talking about the indispensable value of national security and foreign policy experience, he chose a candidate who has none?
McCain made a political calculation to pick a running mate who will please the right and continue Bush's economic policies.
John McCain made a political calculation and has chosen a candidate who will mollify the right and shares his view that the economic policies of George W. Bush are working and should continue.
And that's a risk America can't afford.
Words Banned From This Site
Palindrome
Palindrone
Palindilemma
Palinocracy.
Palimenon
Palintology
Palintologist
Palinogeography
Palinography
But Palinpest is still acceptable... I might use it myself.
Andrew Sullivan
Lots of e-mails asking about Andrew's whereabouts. I checked in with him; he's fine. Worry not, fans.
The Atlantic Electoral Map: 9/9
I'll start weekly analysis of the electoral vote....now.
The dynamics of the race are changing, but the electoral map seems remarkably stable. I base my categories on polling, historical trends, conversations with the campaigns, and the thoughts of smart analysts in those states.
Likely Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA (190 electoral votes)
Lean Obama: IA, MN (17 electoral votes)
Toss-up: CO, FL, MI, NV, NM, NH, OH, VA, WI, PA (131 electoral votes)
Why is Pennsylvania a toss-up? The McCain campaign is competing ferociously there and has shown no signs of letting up. Democrats in the state worry about racial bias in the "T" -- two Democratic elected officials independently told two analysts I respect that they don't trust the polling right now. Same with Michigan: the polling gives Obama a lead. The environment in the state is very weird.
Wisconsin moves back to toss-up pending further analysis, but I suspect it will be back to lean-Obama shortly.
Missouri moves back to lean McCain because of the Palin effect on white women and from conversations with both the Obama and McCain campaigns. It could easily move back; the Obama campaign hasn't pulled a cent from the state. See here. http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/default.aspx?p=2
New Mexico could move to lean Obama.
Quietly, Obama Campaign Calls In The Cavalry
There's been a spurt of 527 activity on behalf of Sen. John McCain, but Barack Obama campaign has suddenly gone silent on the subject.
That's because, after a year of telling donors not to contribute to 527 groups, of encouraging strategists not to form them and of suggesting that outside messaging efforts would not be welcome in Obama's Democratic Party, Obama's strategists have changed their approach.
An Obama adviser privy to the campaign's internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies -- what another campaign aide termed "the cavalry" -- will come to Obama's aid.
The Obama campaign can't ask donors to form outside groups; it can only communicate, through the public and the media, with body language, tells and hints.
The upshot: Obama's campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama. "I assume with their 527s stirring, some [Democratic] ones will as well," another senior campaign official said.
The money is there. The top two 527s -- the Service Employees International Union and America Votes -- are liberal in orientation. The SEIU fund has contributed to other 527 efforts, and America Votes has earmarked most of its money for what it calls the "largest grassroots voter mobilization" in history. The third largest 527 -- American Solutions Winning the Future -- belongs to Newt Gingrich, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The AFL-CIO has budgeted more than $53 million for messaging and turnout efforts and has run a limited flight of ads featuring veterans criticizing McCain. But they've shied away from larger-scale campaigns in part because they believe -- or believed -- that the Obama campaign did not want them mounted.
In April, after Progressive Media USA, a group formed headed by Republican-turned-Democratic media critic Matt David Brock (originally, by Tom Matzzie), announced plans for a $40 million ad campaign against McCain, the Obama campaign send word through associates that donors would be discouraged from raising money for it. After the primaries ended, Brock turned the group into a much-less expensive opposition research concern. Brock bowed to the reality that the Obama campaign wanted to centralize everything -- message, advertising and field operations -- in Chicago.
The Daily Bric-A-Brac: Palin's First Gaffe; Obama Borrows A Line
Gov. Sarah Palin evidently hasn't gotten around to the Fannie/Freddie lessons yet. They're "too expensive" for taxpayers. Which either puts her at odds with the McCain-endorsed federal bailout, or it puts her at odds with reality.
Thought that Tom Toles cartoon sounded weird when it was narrated, unwittingly, by Barack Obama? So did the Boston Globe.
Here's NBC News's post-convention electoral map. Mine will come tomorrow, although one big difference is in the status of Pennsylvania: I think it's still a toss-up; they make it lean. And I'm not yet ready to move Missouri just yet....
More From That Alaska Press Conference: Palin Praises Stevens
Just watching the full press conference with Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Stevens, I noticed an interesting exchange about four minutes and thirty seconds in. Palin: "I have great respect for the senator, and he needs to be heard across America. His voice, his experience, his passion needs to be heard across America so that Alaska can contribute more... There's a big difference between reality and perception [about] our relationship."
Obama Campaign Blasts Palin, McCain As "No Maverick[s]"
A new Obama ad out tonight calls out both John McCain and Sarah Palin....with McCain's sin being that he votes often with President Bush and Palin's sin being that she flip-flopped on the Bridge to Nowhere.
Developing.....
Palin Denies She's A Bridge To Nowhere Maverick? Alaska Dems Say She Is?
I'd like to see the full video before pronouncing, The context is clear from the full video.
Not two months ago, in a news conference with Sen. Ted Stevens, Gov. Sarah Palin seems to say that the reason she opposed -- OK, the Bridge to Nowhere (after Congress killed the specific earmark and sent Alaska the money anyway) was because the politics were no longer tenable. "Seeing the writing on the wall." Oh -- and she says that "both candidates" will reform the earmark process, which stands in contrast to the McCain-Palin message of the day.
Republicans, meanwhile, are happy that Alaska Democrats seemed to give credit to Palin for killing the bridge after the earmark had expired.
Republican Enthusiasm, Doubts About Obama Grow
A new CBS News poll out tonight jibes with findings from Gallup, CNN, Gallup's tracking poll, Zogby and the Hotline tracking poll. McCain and Obama. McCain's doing better; the race is basically dead even.
McCain's standing among evangelicals has doubled from 24% to 48%, and Clinton supporters are eleven points more likely to support Barack Obama. The enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans still exists, but it has narrowed considerably. Is the election still about change? A whopping 65% of registered voters see the Obama-Biden ticket as the force of change, compared to just 47% who associate the word with McCain-Palin.
Conservatives see McCain as one of their own: 72% of voters think that John McCain will either adhere to the conservative policy level associated with President Bush or go to the right of it, which is up a bit from the previous poll.
Obama still not prepared: 42% say he's prepared to be president, versus 76% for McCain. And 55% think it very likely that McCain would be an "effective" commander in chief, up nine points from the previous poll.
Obama still leads on most domestic issues, still leads on the "who shares your values" question, and still understands voters' needs and problems better, these voters say.
Working the ref works: more than half of men and women say the media has treated Gov. Palin too harshly.
Hotline/Diageo Poll: 44-44.
The track by Ed Reilly shows a tied race: 44-44. . It's based on three days worth of interviews -- weekend interviews. McCain's bounce, says Ed, is being driven by independents, moderates, unmarried men, urbanites and even those who disapprove of the job Pres. Bush is doing.
Obama Upconverts His Musings On Palin
In Flint, Michigan today, Barack Obama hinted that, far from being off-limits, Gov. Sarah Palin is coming into focus as a target for the Democrats.
According to CBS News's Maria Gavrilovic, here's what Obama said:
Well,
how about Gov. Palin? She's you know, an up and comer from Alaska. She - they're
starting to run an ad now saying she opposed the bridge to nowhere. Well now,
let's get the facts clear here. When she was mayor, she hired a Washington lobbyist to
get earmarks - pork barrel spending - all the things that John McCain says is bad,
she lobbied to get! And got a whole lot of it. When it came to the bridge to
nowhere, she was for it until everybody started raising a fuss about it and she
started running for governor and then suddenly she was against it!
You
remember that? For it before you were against it? I mean you can't just make
stuff up. You can't just recreate yourself. You can't just reinvent yourself.
The American people aren't stupid.
The Bottom Line For 9/8
Americans associate McCain with Bush and Obama with change, and the race is tied.
The way the Obama campaign sees it, Democrats still have an enthusiasm advantage and a partisan ID advantage, so 50-50 is actually 52-48, and besides, they don't care about the national polls.
The way the McCain campaign sees it is that Obama's message brings diminishing returns, and it's the McCain-Palin ticket right now that is new and exciting.
But
couldn't it have something to do with the way the campaign press reports news?
Back in 2000, the exit polls
showed that among the 24 percent of the electorate who said it was very
important to them to select an "honest and trustworthy" president, 80
percent voted for George W Bush. This, I assume, had something to do with the
fact that the press repeatedly weaved through its coverage of Gore a narrative
about Gore's alleged difficulty telling the truth, even though most of the data
points where Gore lied or "exaggerated" were actually made up by the
press. McCain, by contrast, has not only been caught in several bald-faced
lies, but in a few instances -- this business with Palin and the bridge most
notably -- keeps on doing it
in very high-profile contexts even though they've gotten called on it
repeatedly. So where's the narrative about how McCain's key strategy introducing
Sarah Palin to the public and turning his campaign around is based on putting
lies at the heart of the presentation? There are a few dozen people, of whom
Marc is one, in a position to create this narrative. They've chosen not to do
so, but that's a decision they've made
not a fact about "the way consumers process news."
The positive point is that a small but significant fraction of the electorate seems astonishingly inured to misleading charges and negative attacks. They seem to understand that charges are false, but they don't seem to penalize the offending candidate. They understand that John McCain's summer attacks against Barack Obama were negative, and yet they believed the attacks. The facts suggest that Gov. Sarah Palin did not oppose the Bridge to Nowhere when it was politically inconvenient, but when it became a national bugbear, she opposed it -- although many Alaska politicians continued to support it.
And, of course, though the press has pointed out the Bridge to Nowhere exagerration ever since it was uncovered, it must somehow be the press's fault that John McCain is enjoying a post-convention something-or-other because Americans don't realize that he's a lying liar, or whatever.
To move to a Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press -- well -- read elsewhere if you want to play that game. I'll abstain.
Palin On C-Span
An unvarnished interview from February with C-Span's Steve Scully. Must-view for all Palintologists
Yepsen Calls For Caucus Reform
A big deal...David Yepsen, the Dean of the Iowa political press corps -- and yes, he deserves the capital letter -- calls for fundamental reform of the Iowa precinct caucuses. To wit: Involve the county auditors to maintain integrity. Use secret ballots to prevent pressure tactics and intimidation. Ban same-day registration for the caucuses, which guards against fraud, allow absentee ballots and choose a different day to hold the events.
If you're looking at these ideas and wondering whether they'd make the caucuses more like a primary, you're right. The herd effect would be diminished, and the organizational bias would be on registration and persuasion, not on paying to transport people to the caucus on caucus day.
Alpha Dogs
Howard Wolfson, in his new New Republic blog, writes:
"...ultimately voters will make their assessments based on the strength and weaknesses of the top of the tickets.
So Democrats hope! Usually, voters do. But there's no fundamental reason why, in every instance, they will. The attention lavished on Gov. Palin is unprecedented; perhaps her pull on voters will be, too. Given the relatively low ratings for John McCain's speech (in the Gallup poll, not the Nielsen ratings), it follows that the primary reason for the energy associated with the Republican ticket now resides with Palin. Just because something hasn't happened -- just because voters haven't looked to the number two -- doesn't mean it won't ever happen. Wolfson, like other Democrats, worries that attacking Gov. Palin is foolhardy because "we are focused on Palin is a day we are not
amplifying the Obama campaign's message that Senator McCain simply
represents four more years of President Bush." Well, that message works in one respect -- 63% of voters tell Gallup that they think McCain is too close to Bush -- but it hasn't been sufficient to get Obama above 50%.
Palin's Moment
What to make of the new USA Today / Gallup poll showing John McCain with leads among registered and likely voters? Calling it a convention "bounce" is a little off, as bounces go up and then come down. It's probably best to wait for a week to see how the competing narratives of the past two week settle before concluding that the electorate has shifted fundamentally.
And yet, there are reasons to think that it might have: McCain and Sarah Palin are running a different campaign with different assumptions. They're targeting different states -- Wisconsin is suddenly back in play, Georgia is off the table for now, Missouri seems to be leaning McCain; they have a different message (not experience, but reform); they have the attention of the press. Obama's running the same campaign -- McCain = Bush, Obama = change, 18 states, elections are about issues, and straight on until morning.
For Palin, the news coverage is coming around. It was tough early last week; it seems to be admiring and even fawning today, with the Anchorage Daily News waging a one-paper crusade to set the record straight about her mythology. The tabloid shows -- Extra comes to mind -- seem to be enraptured.
"Original Mavericks"
You can sort of see, from this new McCain-Palin advertisement, why it's so crucial for Barack Obama to link John McCain to the Republican Party. BTW: the ad claims that Palin "stopped the Bridge to Nowhere," which is technically true but functionally false. No blowback, though: the electorate doesn't seem to penalize campaigns for deliberately distorting the record of their candidate and their opponent. It's probably an artifact of twenty years' worth of campaign advertisements and has something to do with the way consumers process news. In any event....
September 5, 2008
Open Thread For Obama Supporters
How should the Obama campaign respond to the Palin phenom?
Diageo/Hotline's New Tracking Poll
Folks at my company are super excited about our newest product -- a 300-sample-per-night daily tracking poll sponsored by the folks at Diageo. Last night's track has Obama up six, 46 to 40 among registered voters.
David Lat's Ex-Hillaryites For Palin. Well, McCain-Palin...
David Lat, the popular, idysocrantic former federal
prosecutor who blogs at Above The Law, has started a Facebook group for former
supporters of Hillary Clinton who now support the McCain-Palin ticket because
Gov. Sarah Palin.
Via Instant Messenger this afternoon, Lat and I had a
conversation about his conversion.
marc ambinder (2:59:31 PM):So -- David Lat -- why Palin?
DavidLatIM (3:00:22 PM):I was just floored by
her performance at the convention.
DavidLatIM (3:00:35 PM):I was a bit skeptical
about her selection at first.
DavidLatIM (3:00:44 PM):But when I saw her
speak, I had the reaction that so many others did.
DavidLatIM (3:00:46 PM):A star is born.
marc ambinder (3:00:51 PM):She's a star. Is she a
VP?
DavidLatIM (3:00:53 PM):This is my Obama - 2004
convention moment.
DavidLatIM (3:01:20 PM):Well, some of my reasons
for supporting Palin are a bit idiosyncratic, and independent of the minutiae
of policy platforms
DavidLatIM (3:01:26 PM):or her record on various
issues.
DavidLatIM (3:01:50 PM):But I do think she would
be a very capable leader.
DavidLatIM (3:02:02 PM):But it's like being in
love -- reason flies out the window!
DavidLatIM (3:02:17 PM):You just have a visceral
reaction to someone, and you're off to the races.
marc ambinder (3:02:26 PM):What were your doubts
about Obama?
marc ambinder (3:02:34 PM):Or -- what ARE your
doubts about Obama?
[OFF THE RECORD INTERLUDE]
DavidLatIM (3:05:22 PM):I think, again, my
issues with Obama are idiosyncratic and somewhat personal.
DavidLatIM (3:05:30 PM):I enjoy being wickedly
cynical about politics.
DavidLatIM (3:05:46 PM):So I find his whole
super-earnest worldview rather offputting.
DavidLatIM (3:05:51 PM):What I like about Palin
DavidLatIM (3:05:57 PM):is that she has his
glibness, his surface appeal,
DavidLatIM (3:06:04 PM):but you can't help
thinking that behind those librarian glasses,
DavidLatIM (3:06:09 PM):she knows she is playing
a role
DavidLatIM (3:06:16 PM):-- and playing it
beautifully.
marc ambinder (3:06:19 PM):Who was that woman from
"The Weakest Link?"
DavidLatIM (3:06:26 PM):Oh, Anne something....
DavidLatIM (3:06:28 PM):[Googling]
marc ambinder (3:06:33 PM):Reminds me of her a
little.
DavidLatIM (3:06:38 PM):Robinson
DavidLatIM (3:06:40 PM):totally!
DavidLatIM (3:06:51 PM):"Joe Biden, you are
the weakest link."
DavidLatIM (3:06:53 PM):Good-bye.
[OFF THE RECORD INTERLUDE]
marc ambinder (3:09:14 PM):Do you worry about
McCain's age / temperament / judgment?
DavidLatIM (3:11:03 PM):I have confidence in
McCain's fitness to be president. But to be totally honest, I wasn't
super-excited,
DavidLatIM (3:11:40 PM):until he picked Palin.
DavidLatIM (3:11:42 PM):One big reason, I must
confess, is that I think it is time for us to have a woman as our president or
vice president.
DavidLatIM (3:11:46 PM):It was a big attraction
of Hillary Clinton's candidacy for me.
DavidLatIM (3:12:33 PM):And even though Palin
and Clinton are obviously miles apart on policy issues,
DavidLatIM (3:12:46 PM):I think that they share
many attributes in common.
marc ambinder (3:12:48 PM):And HRC is going to
campaign against Palin...
DavidLatIM (3:12:56 PM):I know! So
interesting...
marc ambinder (3:13:04 PM):Now -- you are a
sophisticated analyst of culture.
marc ambinder (3:13:08 PM):Talk to me about Bristol
and Levi.
DavidLatIM (3:13:09 PM):If only Obama had picked
her as his veep....
DavidLatIM (3:13:32 PM):Oh my goodness, they
have been endlessly scrutinized, as much as Britney's love handles at last
year's VMAs.
DavidLatIM (3:13:37 PM):Not sure how much more I
can add!
DavidLatIM (3:13:53 PM):Oh but a friend had
something funny
DavidLatIM (3:14:01 PM):She speculated that Levi
was a week away from dumping Bristol
DavidLatIM (3:14:04 PM):but then, bam!
marc ambinder (3:14:06 PM):Ok, but is the campaign
both exploiting sympathy for the family and declaring them off-limits???
ung Americans were ditching their landlines in favor of cells, they took comfort in surveys showing that there was little to no difference in how the two groups responded to surveys. Now, a statistically significant difference has been detected, courtesy of the 
A three night track...
