Let's work together

Gotta work on those chairs.

E

Palin decries 'extreme partisanship'

This qualifies as:
1. extreme stupidity
2. extreme chutzpah
3. extreme contempt for the intelligence of anyone but the brain dead

Palin decries extremist partisanship? Say what?


Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Thursday argued that she and her fellow Republican governors were ready to put aside "extreme partisanship" and act if Washington fails to provide the leadership America needs.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin talks to reporters at the GOP governors' group meeting Thursday in Miami, Florida.

Speaking at her first formal news conference before the national media since the GOP presidential ticket lost last week, the former vice presidential nominee argued that her fellow Republican governors "don't let obsessive, extreme partisanship ... get in the way of doing what's right."

"I think that this group is going to be looked to and looked at for leadership that perhaps had been lacking in Congress and in Washington, D.C.," she said. "This group is going to be uniquely qualified to provide leadership in this nation."

Asked why she chose to hold her first formal news conference now, Palin replied, "The campaign is over."

Who buys this crap?

Newspapers around the world

Some front pages from today's newspapers, including the Anchorage Daily News.

Election results

Yesterday I wrote of FiveThirtyEight.com projecting results for the election: The website projects Obama the winner, capturing 349 electoral votes and 52.3% of the popular vote; 189 and 46.2% are the numbers for McCain.

The results, as of 5pm on the Wednesday after the election, the numbers are: Right now, Barack Obama has 63.7 million popular votes to John McCain's 56.3 million, whereas third party candidates have roughly a collective 1.6 million. That works out to 52.4 percent of the vote for Obama and 46.3 percent for McCain ... conspicuously close to our pre-election estimates of 52.3 percent for Obama and 46.2 percent for McCain.

That is really good.

How far we've come

The New York Daily News has changed. Recently it has surprised me often; this editorial is representative.

Two hundred twenty-one years ago, the Founding Fathers wrote into the U.S. Constitution that slaves were to be counted as three-fifths of a human being in the representative democracy that was being born.

One hundred and forty-seven years ago, the states of the South launched the Civil War to defend the free white citizen's power to hold others in bondage.

One hundred and twelve years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws consigning blacks to "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional.

Forty years ago, a presidential candidate won the votes of 10 million Americans despite having declared, as governor of Alabama: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

And, today, this nation - so haunted by the original sin of slavery, so riven by the torments of race and yet so dedicated to the ideal that all men are created equal - has elevated a black man to the presidency.

We are the beneficiaries of our better angels - while seeming in no small measure surprised that they have won out. The question asked time and again over the last two years has been answered:

Americans were ready after all - yes, we were - to welcome a black man to the White House.

First results are in ...

Corriere de la Sera, Italian newspaper (MIlan) has this headline:

Obama in Indiana, McCain in Kentucky

O, wait; this is further elucidation: Le primissime previsioni con exit poll sono state diffuse da Fox News. Il repubblicano sarebbe in testa in Ohio, con il 51% dei voti, contro il 47% del senatore democratico. Che invece guiderebbe la corsa in Virginia, con il 58% dei voti contro il 39%..

Fox News? Fair and balanced? It shows 2.352% of precints reporting in Indiana, 2.316% in Kentucky. A mite early, methinks.

Obama and the weight of expectations

An interesting take by a Brit living in America.

I understand and share in the excitement that Mr Obama has generated during the course of his campaign. He is an extraordinary politician: instantly likeable, a brilliant speaker, a genuine intellectual, a seeker of consensus, undogmatic, calm, pragmatic and open-minded, with unaffected empathy for the less fortunate. He is the very model of an appealing centre-left leader.

Because of these qualities, he would be a star in US politics if he were white - but he also happens to be black. It arouses accusations of "reverse racism" to point this out, but let us not be squeamish: the fact that he is black is another huge point in his favour.

He is an excellent politician: look at how far he has come since he made the speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004: the Presidency is now his. And his blackness is still preventing many people from appreciating his talents and promise.

Just this afternoon I heard a member of the Library staff express reservations of possible connections Obama might have with Louis Farrakhan, among other unknowns: this is not a dummy (though obviously also not a Mensa candidate, as it were).

I am struck by how fearful many Obama supporters are that latent racism will deny their man the prize. Nonetheless, one great barrier to the social and economic advance of black Americans is self-imposed. Few things are more debilitating than an excuse for failure. Urban black culture, which guides the ambitions of black youngsters, is astonishingly self-destructive. It goes beyond merely accepting failure and taking it for granted; it actually celebrates it.

I have some of that fear, too, though by today I am certain that Obama is winning. And I'm white.

Anything that attacks this mindset would be enormously to the advantage of black Americans and the country at large and, by sheer force of example, that is what Mr Obama's election would do. Wanda Sykes, the black comedienne, put it well when asked what difference a President Obama would make: "You can't keep blaming the man when you are the man."

Agreed: his election is going to be a huge benefit for the nation, Governor Palin and Joe the Plumber notwithstanding. And there are crazies on the far right that will be watching President Obama (has a nice ring to it, the phrase) for hints of his subordinated Marxism and Islamism.

The immediate challenge, of course, will be to manage the economic crisis. I trust the level-headed Mr Obama and his well-chosen technocrats to do a better job of this than the lately erratic and unpredictable John McCain. That same temperament also gives Mr Obama a big advantage in foreign policy. Healthcare reform ought to be among the highest priorities of the next president; Mr Obama's proposals are rightly more ambitious than his rival's and would do much more to widen coverage.

He will his hands full, that is for sure. The economy is in the tank, and recovery isn't close. But that will be a true test of his leadership.

And yet, as I say, I have reservations. If he wins, he will have to carry an insupportable burden of expectations and this is partly his own fault. Great presidents inspire but they also deliver. The plain fact is, Mr Obama cannot deliver what he has promised. The problems he will confront are too difficult.

But one thing he can do is bring hope, change the mentality that is Bush's: shoot first, ask no questions, and damn the opposition.

Poll numbers on Election Day

538.com has projections. I've caught them, and will refer back to them later to judge their accuracy. Time will tell.

The website projects Obama the winner, capturing 349 electoral votes and 52.3% of the popular vote; 189 and 46.2% are the numbers for McCain.

Divided electorate

Who do I vote for?

From TIME magazine:

Right-wing cabal

A Guardian (UK) journalist is one of many writing about it: Conservatives plan secret post-election strategy session. So does Jonathan Martin of Politico: Two days after next week's election, top conservatives will gather at the Virginia weekend home of one of the movement's most prominent members to begin a conversation about their role in the GOP and how best to revive a party that may be out of power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue next year.

Who are these people? The meeting will include a "who's who of conservative leaders -- economic, national security and social," said one attendee, who shared initial word of the secret session only on the basis of anonymity and with some details about the host and location redacted.

Details of next week's post-election meeting, to be attended by state chairmen and prominent activists from the conservative wing of the party, are being kept secret for fear of being seen to pre-empt the outcome of the presidential contest.

But someone has already leaked word about the meeting.

Sarah Palin, John McCain's running-mate, though not present, will be a central figure in discussions about the party's future. "It is about what direction the party takes, the proverbial struggle for the soul of the party," Norman Ornstein, an analyst at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, the home of the neo-conservatives, said yesterday. "There will be a million postmortems and finger-pointing. What is unusual is that the finger-pointing has begun before the campaign has ended."

Palin seems to have repolaced Huckabee, and certainly Romney, as the darling of the right. Those two presumably are not ready to concede anything just yet.

"There's a sense that the Republican Party is broken, but the conservative movement is not," said this source, suggesting that it was the betrayal of some conservative principles by Bush and congressional leaders that led to the party's decline.

Conservatism not broken? Delusional.

Should McCain lose next Tuesday, the conversation will include who to groom as the next generation of conservative leaders – a list that will feature Palin at or near the top.

Grooming the heir-apparent. To take over what, exactly?

Few believe that the Republican party will respond to another brutal election by following a path of moderation, but conservatives are deeply dispirited and anxious to reassert the core values they believe have not always been followed by Bush, congressional leaders and their party’s presidential nominee . Many on the right, both elites and the rank-and-file, see a rudderless party that is in dire need of new blood and old principles: small government, a robust national security and unapologetic social conservatism.

Retreat to the far right; now, that's sensible.

Rush Limbaugh, a powerful figure in the party whose influence has spanned years of the GOP in and out of power, gave voice to this frustration Tuesday, saying candidly that "there is no elected or political leadership in Washington or in the Republican Party that people can rally around."

Limbaugh the king-maker. A windbag, certainly. An ideologue.

Brace yourselves – George Bush will soon be free to do just what he wants

We are about to enter the twilight zone, that strange black hole in political time and space that appears no more than once every four years. It is known as the period of transition, and it starts a week from today, the time when the United States has not one president but two. One will be the president-elect, the other George Bush, in power for 12 more weeks in which he can do pretty much whatever he likes. Not only will he never again have to face voters, he won't even have to worry about damaging the prospects of his own party and its standard bearer (as if he has not damaged those enough already). From November 5 to January 20, he will exercise the freest, most unaccountable form of power the democratic world has to offer.

A scary thought. And, why did they do it?

A former official in the Bush administration confirmed to me yesterday that the US has lunged into Syrian territory several times before: it's just that Damascus chose to keep quiet. In which case, the interesting question is why the Syrians went public this time.

This was a deliberate act, calculated to send a series of messages. First, to the Syrians, reminding them who's boss in the region and strong-arming them to do more to crack down on al-Qaida.

Second, to the Europeans who have been moving towards a rapprochement with Damascus. Nicolas Sarkozy may have invited President Assad to Paris and David Miliband may have been hosting the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, in London this very Monday, 24 hours after the raid - but no matter. Bush gets to remind both these uppity Europeans who's in charge.

Third, the president could have been sending a message to his own administration.

However we are meant to read it, the attack on Syria looks a lot like a parting shot from Bush, an end-of-the-movie reminder of what this long and bloody saga has been about. A small operation, causing eight deaths, it nevertheless captures much of the Bush ethos that has ruled the globe these past eight years. It was unilateral; it trampled on state sovereignty; and it relied on force as a first, not last, resort. As a souvenir of the Bush era, it would be hard to top.

Bush may be thinking of a parting gift more in keeping with the record of the last eight years. He and Cheney might decide, what the hell, we have one last chance to whack Iran - and let the new guy clear up the mess. Not likely, but possible. For in the twilight zone, anything can happen.

Sense of Unease in Some Black Voters

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — For weeks now, James Jones has been extra courteous in traffic and at the gas station because he has an Obama sticker on the back of his truck. “Something like that might make a difference for Barack Obama,” Mr. Jones explained. “I’m not taking a chance.”

I never did get my car magnet, and I'm disappointed.

in conversations with about a dozen Jacksonville residents in cafes, outside churches and at their homes over three days, Mr. Jones and many of his black neighbors worry anyway, unable to put aside the nagging feeling that somehow their votes will not be counted.

Florida was a key in the 2000 election results.

Wounds have not healed here in Duval County since the mangled presidential election of 2000, when more than 26,000 ballots were discarded as invalid for being improperly punched. Nearly 40 percent of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly Democratic-leaning African-American communities around Jacksonville, a reality that has caused suspicions of racial bias to linger, even though intentional disenfranchisement was never proved.

26 thousand votes would have elected Al Gore.

But amid excitement over Mr. Obama’s historic candidacy and the chance that the country might choose an African-American president within a matter of days, there is an unmistakable sense of anxiety among blacks here that something will go wrong, that victory will slip away.






James Jones, an Obama supporter, at his home in Jacksonville, Fla., with his wife, Mary, and two of their three sons, James Jr., left, and Anthony.

The Next New Deal

A fascinating discussion on what is happening as Obama is on the verge of getting elected President, and what might happen in his Administration first 100 days. Given the economic turmoil and uncertainty and even fear, FDR springs up as an example to follow, or at least to study, to learn from.

With the specter of a full-blown depression looming, the Age of Roosevelt—the campaign he ran in 1932, the challenges he faced upon assuming office, the “bold, persistent experimentation” he called for and the New Deal edifice he erected in response—is much on the minds of the nominee and his inner circle. “A lot of people around Barack are reading books about FDR’s first hundred days,” says a member of Obama’s kitchen cabinet. “It’s a sign of the shift that’s going on emotionally: from being on this improbable mission to believing, Hey, we’re going to win.”

It is quite clear that he is going to win; doubters and naysayers, let alone conservatives in denial, might beg to differ, but they are being delusional.

... as the outcome of the race has begun to seem more certain with each passing day—with Obama’s lead in the polls healthy and showing few signs of diminishing, with John McCain’s campaign listing aimlessly and lapsing into rank self-parody, with Sarah Palin devolving into a human punch line—Democrats are slowly, haltingly allowing themselves to believe that victory is truly within their grasp, and hence to contemplate what comes next. Transition. Inauguration. Those first hundred days. Maybe even, perchance, with augmented majorities for the party in both the House and Senate all but in the bag, the dawning of a spanking-new era of Democratic dominion.

In 1992 Clinton's election made it seem that a new Democratic Era was beginning; but then he pursued that dreadful don't ask don't tell policy, pursued health care reform too early, and by 1994 Gingrich was on the ascendancy. And now Obama faces economic catastrophe; when Clinton took office a mild recession was ending.

All too aware that, should he win, these cascading crises will leave Obama with no time to gain his sea legs and terrifyingly little margin for error, he and his people, to a degree few realize, have been planning their transition from campaigning to governing for months with characteristic care and rigor. Like so much about Obama’s historic bid for the presidency, the first few days and weeks and months will be like nothing we have seen before—and all of it grounded in the insight that, mind-boggling as it might sound, winning was the easy part. These are Democrats they’ll be dealing with, after all.

After abandoning Michigan, McCain is counting on and devoting great resources to winning Pennsylvania as a last gambit to stop the Obama onslaught.

More than a few Republican strategists, however, regard the Pennsylvania gambit as desperate and doomed. “They’re smoking crack,” says consultant Alex Castellanos. “It’s one thing for a working-class Democrat to vote against Obama on culture in a Democratic primary. You’re still voting for a Democrat; you still get to be a Democrat. But to vote for McCain, you have to become a Republican. I don’t see it.” “There’s a reason we haven’t won Pennsylvania since 1988: It’s a Democratic state,” says another GOP guru. “Obama is ahead by double digits. And if McCain rolls out the Wright thing there, the national backlash will be huge, and moderate states like Florida will disappear as opportunities.”

As Obama rolls on to victory, winning additional Senate and House seats takes on added importance to allow the Democrats to dictate the legislative agenda in the next Congress.

What happens at the ballot box is just the first step toward building a stable, lasting majority. As Democratic Leadership Council president Bruce Reed puts it, “The battle for realignment starts the day after the election.” It starts, in other words, with the transition—the first test of Obama’s mettle.

I think he's a very good politician, a magnificent organizer, and his campaign shows he knows how to assemble a good team and let it work. But governing is a different ball of wax. It begins with the transition, and initial Cabinet appointments.

It should come as no surprise that No Drama Obama wants his transition to be nothing like that of Chaotic Clinton’s. Already his pre-transition is exhibiting the kind of order and discipline (and lack of leaks) that have been the hallmarks of his campaign.

Given the unusually crisis-plagued environment into which Obama will be stepping, he will want to move quickly, especially when it comes to selecting his Cabinet. Almost certain to come first, perhaps within days, will be his economic and national-security teams. And with those choices, they say, he will want to send a message of centrism and bi-partisanship. It’s conceivable that Obama will ask Bob Gates to stay on as Defense secretary; Chuck Hagel, too, might find a place high in the administration. But although there has been chatter that Obama might also retain Hank Paulson at the Treasury, the inside betting is on a Larry Summers encore. “They’re gonna want somebody who knows the building, knows the economy, has been confirmed before and been advising them on economics,” says the former Clinton aide. “I’d be flabbergasted if they chose somebody else.”

Hagel would be a great choice. Gates should be allowed to go gracefully. Paulson? I don't see that being a prudent choice: Paulson is Bush's man, and the economic explosion happened even as he had a bazooka he thought he wouldn't have to wield. Nah.

Obama has no inbuilt animosity toward the congressional leadership. Sure, he vowed to transform Washington, but he did not run against it. He is surrounded by people—Emanuel, Podesta, former Tom Daschle aide Pete Rouse, and Daschle himself, who stands a reasonable chance of being Obama’s White House chief of staff—steeped in the legislative culture and masters of the legislative arena.

Daschle sounds a good choice: working with former colleagues would make him a popular choice, one would think, sending a signal that the Administration will work with, not fight with, Congress.

Not that dealing with a pair of institutions led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will be any kind of picnic. “They’re incredibly weak leaders running a Congress with 12 percent approval ratings,” one Democratic think-tank maven says. “They’re not people with much of a record of, you know, actually getting things done.” Making matters worse, Obama will be hounded constantly by the old-school liberal interest groups, with all their bottled-up desires and demands. The unions, the health-care groups, the teachers, and so on: Everyone will have their hand out.

I sure do hope he makes his toughness clear; he does seem decisive. He'll need resolve, along with everything else.

“My view is that we gotta be the party of reform,” Emanuel begins when I reach him on his cell phone. “There are four reforms. There’s financial-regulatory reform, tax reform, health-care reform, and energy. Regulatory will kinda come down the chute fast. Tax reform will take a little longer, because it’s not until 2010 that Bush’s tax cuts expire. Energy, you can do some things immediately. And with health care, you’ve got the children’s health insurance as the first piece of a series of things you gotta do.”

Rham Emanuel worked for Clinton; he has become quite an accomplished legislator.

Already Obama is hinting strongly at what his priorities will be. Consistent with what Emanuel told me, Obama now informs Time’s Joe Klein that endeavoring to spark “a new energy economy [is] going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.” At the same time, Obama will surely press immediately for his middle-class tax cut, which happens to be sound economics in recessionary times and also irresistible politically.

Obama Chances in Suburbs Rest on Population Shift

Another take on the presidential race of 2008: changing demographics affecting the vote.

“In many ways, these two candidates are the bookends of the demographic, racial transformation that's going on in the United States,'' Bill Frey, a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said at a forum last week.

A 47-year-old black man and a 72-year-old white man: bookends in age, of two different generations. Harks back to JFK taking over from Ike.

If Leesburg, the area west of Dulles airport, goes Democratic, “Barack Obama is likely to win the election, just based on that single piece of information,'' said Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, Virginia. “If you take up too much of the metropolitan vote, there's not enough rural voters left'' for Republicans to win, he said.

More Hispanics, more Asians, more college graduates.

Much of the 47-year-old Illinois senator's advantage in national polls is shaped by voter anxiety over the economy. Other factors may be at work as well. What Frey called demographic “mega trends'' – or major changes in voting populations – also are recasting the electorate. While the economy looms large, “we need to keep an eye out on these mega trends and not be too blinded by the issue aspect'' of the election, said Frey.

It's an abrupt shift; W. Bush won Virginia 4 years ago.And he did so by appealing to a demographic David Brooks labeled Patio Man: a married exurban man culturally conservative. Sort of the Suffolk County dude who watches football on his large-screen TV, drive an SUV and has a perky wife and three kids.

Another mega-trend is the Hispanic population. There are many more Hispanics in Nevada now than there were 4 years ago, a trend favoring Democrats.

Their votes could be pivotal in some Sun Belt states like Nevada, which has recorded 52,000 new immigrant and Latino registrations since February, according to the We Are America Alliance, a Washington-based immigrant and minority rights group. That's more than twice Bush's 2004 victory margin. Bush also won New Mexico by less than 6,000 votes in 2004, and there are 40,000 new registrations there.

Two important states.

The final “mega'' demographic trend is the rise of a new generation of voters – the so-called millennials – whose political leanings have been shaped by the last two presidencies.

The millennials “have two presidents they can remember in their adulthood,'' Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, Keeter said at the Brookings forum. “This has been very good for the Democratic brand with this age group.''

Talkin' moose

It is silly season in the presidential campaign: two weeks remain, and the Republican ticket is in deep trouble, sinking slowly into the mire. MoveOn.org, a staunchly liberal group with lots of cash to burn, has come up with a talking moose advert.



MoveOn.org’s political arm released a new 30-second ad, “Moose,” today featuring a talking mounted moose head that will air in markets based on where Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s travels over the next two weeks.

The liberal activist group said the ad was spurred by the latest Washington Post/ABC poll out today that shows 52% of respondents stating they have less confidence in John McCain because of his choice of running mate.

The ad began airing today in Las Vegas in anticipation of Palin’s scheduled Tuesday visit. Since a candidate’s traveling schedule isn’t released too far in advance, a spokeman for MoveOn said the ad buys will be done in increments. Next up is Ohio, where Palin is scheduled to travel this week.

“You really gotta question John McCain’s judgment pickin’ Sarah Palin as his VP,” the animated moose says in the ad, who also, apparently, hails from Alaska, “We know her up here. She doesn’t have any national security experience. She can’t even explain Bush’s war policy. But she supports his war. And now she’s an expert because she can see Russia? McCain is 72 and she could end up in charge. She may be a little ‘trigger-happy’–I should know.”

The Alaska governor recently discussed the charms of moose hunting on the trail at stops in New Hampshire and Maine. “I know that we can count on the good people of New Hampshire because you’re a lot like the people of Alaska,” she told a crowd last week in Dover, N.H. “We all love good moose hunting, I know that.”

UPDATE: A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee offered this response to the MoveOn ad: “Americans support the McCain-Palin ticket because it represents the real reform that our nation needs. Unlike Barack Obama and his left-wing allies, John McCain and Sarah Palin have a record of reaching across party lines and shaking up the status quo, and they understand that we need to keep taxes low for families and small businesses during our current economic crisis.”

Joe the Plumber

Peter Brookes's take on the plumber. Apt.

Joe in the Spotlight

This decidedly falls into the category of "be careful what you say." In last night's debate Senator McCain brought up a "Joe the Plumber" as an example of how Senator Obama would negatively impact small business owners with his fiscal policies. In fact, McCain mentioned Joe the Plumber two dozen times.

It turns out that a little fame is a dangerous thing for Joe. He ain't a Joe, nor a plumber. Oops.

Turns out that “Joe the Plumber,” as he became nationally known when Senator John McCain made him a theme at Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate, may run a plumbing business but he is not a licensed plumber. His full name is Samuel J. Wurzelbacher. And he owes a bit in back taxes. The premise of his question to Mr. Obama about taxes may also be flawed, according to tax analysts.



Oopsie-doo.

An official at Local 50 of the plumber’s union, based in Toledo, said Mr. Wurzelbacher does not hold a license. He also has never served an apprenticeship and does not belong to the union. (The national plumber’s union, the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters, and Service Mechanics, endorsed Mr. Obama, it should be noted.) “He’s basically playing games with the world,” Thomas Joseph, the local’s business manager, said in a telephone interview Thursday morning.

Double oops.

On Thursday, he told the Associated Press that he felt like Britney Spears. “I’m kind of like Britney Spears having a headache,” he said. “Everybody wants to know about it.”

Why's everybody pickin' on me?

“All contractors are licensed, and he does not have a license, either as a contractor or a plumber,” the union official said, citing a search of government records. “I can’t find that he’s ever even applied for any kind of apprenticeship, and he has never belonged to local 189 in Columbus, which is what he claims on his Facebook page.” According to public records, Mr. Wurzelbacher has been subject to two liens, each over $1,000, one of which — a personal tax lien — is still outstanding.

Triple oops.

And his question to Mr. Obama about paying taxes? According to some tax analysts, if Mr. Wurzelbacher’s gross receipts from his business is $250,000 — and not his taxable income — then he would not have to pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s plan, and probably would be eligible for a tax cut.

Say it ain't so, Joe. There you go again.

McCain, the Media, Money, and Montesinos (and Obama Too)

Fascinating analysis of money in politics. And of money and politics.

So Barack Obama continues to raise millions upon millions of dollars, and if he wins the election a lot of people will certainly attribute his victory, at least in significant part, to this money. But should they?

It seems obvious that money wins elections.

What really matters for a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are.

The money Obama is spending is staggering: $160 million on TV ads, easily dwarfing every other expenditure. Staff salaries, for instance, were $44 million; campaign events cost $16 million. And $21 million on TV in the first week of October alone, and is buying up prime-time network space at the end of October to run a 30-minute infomercial.

That is a lot of money. But our argument is that money is more a symptom of a winning campaign than a cause.

How so?

In other words: it’s not that raising a lot of money helps a candidate become more appealing and therefore do better; it’s that better candidates raise a lot of money because they are so appealing. Just remember: about a year ago, Mitt Romney was loaded and John McCain was just about broke. If money is so central to elections, why couldn’t Romney put McCain away? And how on earth did McCain end up winning the G.O.P. nomination?

That's convincing: Romney was supposed, by some, to be a shoo-in, or a favorite, because he had business savvy, a pretty family, a solid record. But he tanked.

So what is the right way to think about the relationship between money, the media, and campaign outcomes? Is it wise for Obama to spend so much on media? Is it wise for McCain to risk alienation of the media? Would all that money and energy be better spent on something else? There may be some wisdom to be gleaned from a strange incident in the not-too-distant past in Peru. A few years ago, the economists John McMillan and Pablo Zoido wrote a fantastically interesting paper about Vladimiro Montesinos, who ran the Peruvian secret service under President Alberto Fujimori.

I well remember Fujimori. Late in his presidency, and after he fell, Montesinos emerged as a sleazeball. Fuji's sleazeball.

Of the four main categories of bribe beneficiaries — police, judges, politicians, media owners — whom do you think Montesinos paid off the most?

Here’s the answer, as summarized by Richard Morin in The Washington Post:

It wasn’t even close. “One single television channel’s bribe was four times larger than the total of the opposition politicians’ bribes,” [the economists] found. “By revealed preference, the strongest check on the government’s power was the news media.”

The power of media. One fascinating detail about Palin's tete-a-tete with the NY Times is that she began to quote the Times.

Losers: McCain Struggles to Hold South

I think this is what is known as losing a campaign; regardless of the noise and media attention generated by the Republican ticket, the facts point down: they are losing, and sinking fast.

Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin are scheduled to roll into Virginia on Monday in a bid to stop the Republican ticket's slide in the state and thwart what once was unthinkable: fractures in the "Solid South," the backbone of successful Republican presidential politics for four decades.

What Nixon wrought and Reagan exploited, wahat Bush 1 and Bush 2 rode, is gone, lipstick and all.

Fueled by demographic shifts, rising doubts about the direction of the country, perceived missteps by Sen. McCain and a voter-registration push by the Obama campaign that has helped add a net of 310,000 new, mostly younger voters, the Democratic ticket increasingly appears positioned to win Virginia and make critical inroads across the South. A CNN/Time Inc. poll released Wednesday shows Sen. Obama has opened a nine-point lead on Sen. McCain in Virginia.

The organizing derided by Palin is a central fact in Obama's success: organize at the grass-roots level, get the votes and the numbers, and win. McCain and the Republicans took much for granted, beginning with the assumption that simply because Nixon and Reagan won the votes in Virginia and other Suthern outposts they could count on such numbers to favor them, continuing with the idea that using code words ("terrorist" and "not winning in Iraq") would shift voting patterns based on deeper issues, inclusing a national economy in the toilet.

While much attention has focused on Midwestern battlegrounds such as Ohio, Sen. Obama's campaign has pressed for a deathblow below the Mason-Dixon line: In the week ended Oct. 4, Sen. Obama outspent Sen. McCain's campaign by 8-to-1 in North Carolina, 3-to-1 in Florida and 3-to-1 in Virginia.

Obama might even get the blue-hair vote. Florida might just put him over the top.

The McCain-Palin travails in the South mirror troubles the Republican ticket has faced around the country. A series of polls show them falling behind, or just running even, in a number of swing states that President George W. Bush carried in 2004, from Colorado to Indiana to Missouri. A series of national polls released during the weekend showed Sen. Obama with leads ranging from six to 11 percentage points.

In different economic times the crap that Palin is spouting might have worked, but these are not times when people can ignore politics for nonsense such as a 1960s radical and abortion rules.

Sen. McCain's slippage follows a particularly rough couple of weeks for his campaign. The financial crisis has made the economy the election's central issue -- one on which surveys show voters trust Sen. Obama more. Gov. Palin faced a weekend of critical news coverage following an Alaska legislative report concluding that she violated state ethics laws, following an abuse-of-power probe concerning a state trooper once married to her sister.

These are a couple of bozoes that are going down in flames -- thank goodness.

The changes in Prince William County reflect a major shift in many of the burgeoning suburbs of northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, the state's two most populous regions. Prince William, once a rural outpost of older, ex-military whites, is rapidly becoming an affluent Washington suburb of young families, Hispanics and Asians who are more open to Democratic policies.

They are so busy pandering to the evangelical reactonaries that they are mis-connecting with what would otherwise be their actual base of voters.

Such as: Karen Krivo, a 41-year-old mother of two from the town of Haymarket, is part of the change. A registered Republican, she says she will vote for Sen. Obama in support of his economic proposals. Ms. Krivo began volunteering in the Obama campaign's Manassas office in September. "I identify with the conservative values of the Republican Party, but I can admit that my party's policies have gotten us here," Ms. Krivo says. "I was let down."

They're spouting off about a 1960s radical while 401K Savings plans have lost 66% of their values. They are talking about abortion while people are afraid of losing jobs, houses and the last vestiges of economic security.

... local surrogates in Virginia unleashed more-shrill attacks. Sen. McCain's younger brother, Joe, 65, told supporters at a rally in Loudon County, a key northern Virginia battleground, that areas of the state where Obama has stronger support are "communist country." Mr. McCain, a former newspaper reporter and Navy petty officer, later apologized for the statement.

Such desperate tactics are backfiring, and are wholly ineffective with others than the fringe fanatics that still think that a pitbull with lipstick belong within a country mile pf having access to the nuclear code.

A southwest Virginia newspaper published a column late last month written by the chairman of Sen. McCain's Buchanan County campaign that was laced with racially tinged wisecracks: suggesting an Obama administration would respond to a terrorist threat by learning to speak Arabic, "raise taxes to pay for free drugs for Obama's inner-city political base" and replace the 50 stars on the U.S. flag with the Islamic symbol of a star and crescent.

Who but jerks and people who think Klansmen (or should it be Kalns-people) are patriotic would respond to that crap?

Still, the reality, what counts, is: The political fundamentals in Virginia are also tightening contests in other southern states, such as North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.

Such numbers as these count: In North Carolina, Sen. Obama had surged five points during the past month and overtaken Sen. McCain as of Oct. 6, according to an average of polls compiled by RealClear Politics, whose Web site aggregates poll findings. Another poll showed Gov. Palin's approval ratings in the state plummeting 11 points during the past three weeks. Newly registered Democrats in the state outnumber Republican registrants by 6-to-1. Blacks and Hispanics made up half of the nearly 400,000 new voters.

5 points in the lead NC is a virtual tie; Palin losing 11 points in 3 weeks is quite significant: she spouts the sort of nonsense and hatred that the Nixon-Reagan-Bush crowd would expect to have an impact, and it ain't; 400 thousand new voters who will, it is safe to assume, overwhelmingly favour Obama are significant numbers.

Even in states where Sen. Obama's chances of outright winning remain doubtful, his decision to continue campaigning in many of them is narrowing Sen. McCain's leads and bolstering the prospects of Democrats in down-ticket races for governorships and the U.S. Senate.

Another part of the calculus. As are these numbers: In early balloting in Georgia, African-Americans made up 39% of more than 369,000 voters, despite constituting only 29% of the electorate. Partly powered by African-American votes, Jim Martin, the once long-shot Democratic challenger to Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, has pulled from 15 points behind to a dead heat in recent polling. Sen. Obama himself has closed Sen. McCain's double-digit lead in Georgia to seven points. Former Mississippi Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove now trails just two points behind Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, who was appointed to the seat this year after Sen. Trent Lott resigned.

What used to be solid conservative seats such as Lott's are now up in the air. Ditto with schmuck Chambliss, a benefactor of the attacks on Max Cleland, as I recall. The whole Bush team is a big bunch of slimeballs, and their upswing is ending in a potfull of disaster. W and Poppy Buch might not feel the sting, and really wont, considering their money and stupidity and oblivion, but their age is over, thank goodness.