Should I vote for Clinton or Obama?

Like Rebecca Traister, we're Edwards supporters who can't figure out who to vote for tomorrow.

So let's review the list, including, for this purpose, the GOP:

Smartest: Hillary Clinton

Best policies: Hillary Clinton

Most disturbing choice for American democracy: Hillary (Bush Clinton Bush) Clinton

Least bad republican: John McCain

Best executive and management skills: Mitt Romney

Supports torture: Mitt "thumbscrews" Romney

Most disastrous choice: Mitt Romney

Most inspirational: Barack Obama

Toughest fighter: Hillary Clinton (John McCain is next)

Republican most likely to win: John McCain

Best president: Hillary Clinton ties with Barack Obama -- for different reasons. Obama may win overall because slavery is the historic American curse, and Obama can be a part of a cure.

Democrat most likely to win against McCain ...

Ahh, the last is the reason we struggle.

Today Hillary energizes the "independents" -- to vote for McCain. Given time I think she might win over many of the women "independents". Overall I think Hillary can win nationally among women, even if men vote for McCain.

I don't trust white (including, in this case, Hispanic) Florida democrats for vote for Obama -- no matter their silence today.

If they had equal odds against McCain I'd vote for Obama - because slavery really is the curse at the heart of America. If he were a white guy with a similar story he'd still be an astounding person and potentially an excellent president, but he wouldn't be in this race.

I fear McCain would beat Obama though, even though the Giants did win the Super Bowl.

I'm still undecided.

Update: Krugman is pushing me closer to Hillary.

Update: A colleague claims Obama is being smart about mandates -- knowing what Americans would accept. Good point.

Update: My most influential friends are pushing me to Obama. Krugman, another Edwards orphan, feels that electability, my main issue, favors neither. If it's Obama I don't think Nader, despite his GOP funding, will have any traction.

So, for the moment, Obama.

Update 2/5/2008: My reading of James Fallows analysis is that he's in the same spot as Emily and I. Straining the tea leaves, he too favors Obama. The riskier bet, the greater return -- if it works.

Will the NYT break the "balance" rule? Kristof's late awakening.

Another sign that that mainstream journalists are, very, very slowly, beginning to realize that the GOP has played them for 12 years (emphases mine) ...

Op-Ed Columnist - The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama - Kristof - NYTimes.com

... a McCain commercial last month mimicked the words and imagery of the best-selling Christian “Left Behind” book series in ways that would have set off alarm bells among evangelicals nervous about the Antichrist.

Mr. McCain himself is not popular with evangelicals. But they will vote for him if they think the other guy may be on Satan’s side.

In fact, of course, Mr. Obama took his oath on the Bible, not — as the rumors have it — on the Koran. He is far more active in church than John McCain is.

(Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...)

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him...

... I’m writing in part out of a sense of personal responsibility. Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim — as if that in itself were wrong — regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia. In that interview, Mr. Obama praised the Arabic call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,” and he repeated the opening of it.

This should surprise no one: the call to prayer blasts from mosque loudspeakers five times a day, and Mr. Obama would have had to have been deaf not to learn the words as a child. But critics, like Jerome Corsi, whose book denouncing Mr. Obama, “The Obama Nation,” is No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, quote from that column to argue that Mr. Obama has mysterious ties to Islam. I feel a particular obligation not to let my own writing be twisted so as to inflame bigotry and xenophobia.

Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome.

Well, at least Obama isn't being accused of atheism. That would be really serious. Being the anti-Christ ain't so bad.

There are only two interesting aspects to the late-to-the-game Kristof column. One is that he's right that the religious ploy is a great proxy for racial prejudice. My opinion of the religious right can't really get any lower though; their enthusiasm for torture in the name of the Savior Bush pretty much dropped 'em into my eternal pit of fire.

The more important point is his belated call that journalists need to stop the play-by-play and start calling foul. Too little, probably too late, but it's progress of a sort. It moves Kristof a good step above the Friedman/Dowd basement.

Incidentally, I was amazed to discover that there's a segment of the "right" that thinks Jerome Corsi is "embarrassing for the Right, embarrassing for Republicans, embarrassing for conservatives and libertarians, embarrassing for all of us". Not bad from someone belonging to a social movement striving to destroy civilization. Of course if they were really serious they'd be campaigning for Obama, so that upon losing power the GOP would start to rebuild and reform.

Update 9/22/08: The McCain campaign freaks out. They don't like journalists who point out that their pants are on fire.

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy...

Heh, heh, heh. They're worried. This is good.

The NYT's giant Obama endorsement - highlights

I don't recall the NYT going to quite this length when they endorsed Kerry or Gore. I get the feeling that when Palin/McCain wins their despair will rival mine ...

Editorial - Barack Obama - Editorial Board - Endorsement - NYTimes.com

October 24, 2008

Barack Obama for President

Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance...

... As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

... Mr. Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change. He has shown a cool head and sound judgment. We believe he has the will and the ability to forge the broad political consensus that is essential to finding solutions to this nation’s problems.

In the same time, Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.

Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong. But there is a greater value in looking closely at the facts of life in America today and at the prescriptions the candidates offer. The differences are profound. ...

.... Mr. McCain talks about reform a lot, but his vision is pinched. His answer to any economic question is to eliminate pork-barrel spending — about $18 billion in a $3 trillion budget — cut taxes and wait for unfettered markets to solve the problem.

Mr. Obama is clear that the nation’s tax structure must be changed to make it fairer. That means the well-off Americans who have benefited disproportionately from Mr. Bush’s tax cuts will have to pay some more. Working Americans, who have seen their standard of living fall and their children’s options narrow, will benefit. Mr. Obama wants to raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation, restore a climate in which workers are able to organize unions if they wish and expand educational opportunities.

Mr. McCain, who once opposed President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy as fiscally irresponsible, now wants to make them permanent. And while he talks about keeping taxes low for everyone, his proposed cuts would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent of Americans while digging the country into a deeper fiscal hole.

... While Iraq’s leaders insist on a swift drawdown of American troops and a deadline for the end of the occupation, Mr. McCain is still taking about some ill-defined “victory.” As a result, he has offered no real plan for extracting American troops and limiting any further damage to Iraq and its neighbors.

Mr. Obama was an early and thoughtful opponent of the war in Iraq, and he has presented a military and diplomatic plan for withdrawing American forces. Mr. Obama also has correctly warned that until the Pentagon starts pulling troops out of Iraq, there will not be enough troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan...

... Mr. Obama would have a learning curve on foreign affairs, but he has already showed sounder judgment than his opponent on these critical issues. His choice of Senator Joseph Biden — who has deep foreign-policy expertise — as his running mate is another sign of that sound judgment. Mr. McCain’s long interest in foreign policy and the many dangers this country now faces make his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska more irresponsible...

... Mr. Obama wants to reform the United Nations, while Mr. McCain wants to create a new entity, the League of Democracies — a move that would incite even fiercer anti-American furies around the world.

Unfortunately, Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, sees the world as divided into friends (like Georgia) and adversaries (like Russia). He proposed kicking Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations even before the invasion of Georgia. We have no sympathy for Moscow’s bullying, but we also have no desire to replay the cold war. The United States must find a way to constrain the Russians’ worst impulses, while preserving the ability to work with them on arms control and other vital initiatives...

.. Under Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the justice system and the separation of powers have come under relentless attack. Mr. Bush chose to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the moment in which he looked like the president of a unified nation, to try to place himself above the law.

Mr. Bush has arrogated the power to imprison men without charges and browbeat Congress into granting an unfettered authority to spy on Americans. He has created untold numbers of “black” programs, including secret prisons and outsourced torture. The president has issued hundreds, if not thousands, of secret orders. We fear it will take years of forensic research to discover how many basic rights have been violated.

Both candidates have renounced torture and are committed to closing the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But Mr. Obama has gone beyond that, promising to identify and correct Mr. Bush’s attacks on the democratic system. Mr. McCain has been silent on the subject.

... [McCain] helped the White House push through the appalling Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denied detainees the right to a hearing in a real court and put Washington in conflict with the Geneva Conventions, greatly increasing the risk to American troops.

The next president will have the chance to appoint one or more justices to a Supreme Court that is on the brink of being dominated by a radical right wing. Mr. Obama may appoint less liberal judges than some of his followers might like, but Mr. McCain is certain to pick rigid ideologues. He has said he would never appoint a judge who believes in women’s reproductive rights...

.. It will be an enormous challenge just to get the nation back to where it was before Mr. Bush, to begin to mend its image in the world and to restore its self-confidence and its self-respect. Doing all of that, and leading America forward, will require strength of will, character and intellect, sober judgment and a cool, steady hand.

Mr. Obama has those qualities in abundance. Watching him being tested in the campaign has long since erased the reservations that led us to endorse Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries. He has drawn in legions of new voters with powerful messages of hope and possibility and calls for shared sacrifice and social responsibility.

Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.

He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush’s misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform...

... Mr. Obama has withstood some of the toughest campaign attacks ever mounted against a candidate. He’s been called un-American and accused of hiding a secret Islamic faith. The Republicans have linked him to domestic terrorists and questioned his wife’s love of her country. Ms. Palin has also questioned millions of Americans’ patriotism, calling Republican-leaning states “pro-America.”

This politics of fear, division and character assassination helped Mr. Bush drive Mr. McCain from the 2000 Republican primaries and defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004. It has been the dominant theme of his failed presidency.

The nation’s problems are simply too grave to be reduced to slashing “robo-calls” and negative ads. This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities.

If/when Palin/McCain win, it will be because we don't deserve the opportunity Obama/Biden are offering us.

Goldwater for Obama? Try this endorsement on any conservatives you know.

Know any rational conservatives?

Maybe they're considering writing in a rational republican like Olympia Snowe?

Try this endorsement on them. It's written by a man who was once publisher of the National Review, and who is still an intellectual conservative ...

A Conservative for Obama | D Magazine - Wick Allison

... Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama...

The comments include this amazing gem ..

Your article endorsing Obama found its way to my computer, Wick... and I wanted you to know you have a VERY strong "thumbs up" from three folks you might least expect: my two sisters and me. We are the daughters of Bill Miller who ran for Vice President with Barry Goldwater back in '64. We have all morphed quite independently into feeling, as you do, that the Republican Party in general and George Bush in particular do not represent in any fashion what our dad stood for more than 40 years ago. In fact, we are all HUGE Obama Mamas! I live with my family in Salisbury, NC... my older sister Libby Miller Fitzgerald is in Lynchburg, VA... and our youngest sister Stephanie Miller is in LA where she has a nationally syndicated radio talk show and is seen regularly on Larry King and other TV shows. Thank you for your wise words. I hope there are enough others like you to put Obama over the top. Or we're headed overseas to live!

Mary Miller James

A Goldwater endorsement for Obama? And I thought George Will's endorsement was mind blowing.

Update: See also. It's all part of the Republican enlightenment kit. These are the people who will be able, if McCain loses, to fight for a respectable, reformed, GOP.

Andy Martin: ally of the Right, FOX TV guest, anti-semite loon

Andy Martin specializes in generating lies about Obama that the Right likes to hear - and repeat.

FOX TV, in particular, has been a great repeater. Palin/McCain have played on those lies when it served them. Their supporters scream them aloud; they believe what they see on FOX TV and hear on talk radio.

Today the NYT tells us where the lies come from. They also expose FOX TV for what it is -- a curse upon America and an enemy of the enlightenment. Emphases mine.

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama - NYTimes.com

October 13, 2008
By JIM RUTENBERG

... an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

... The CBS News program "48 Hours" in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, "See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits," to what it called his prolific filings. (Mr. Martin has also been known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation....

...Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin...

... Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam...

Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry... Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”

Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists...

... Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”...

Mr. Martin has been a darling of the whacko Right, but politically he's an anti-semitic loon. He in turn inspired Mr. Corsi, who became wealthy writing a book of lies popular with the Right. Sampley, another talk radio favorite, keys off Martin as well.

So Martin, Corsi, and Sampley are Obama's enemies. I think that's reason alone to support Obama.

The great irony of course, is that the ravings of a pro-Holocaust anti-semite should find a credulous audience with some American Jews. I'm hoping this superb NYT article will help with that particular problem.

Christopher Buckley's Obama endorsement and some good news for a change

Christopher Buckley writes the back page of the National Review.

He ain't a guy I'd normally read, but the wonders of the net sent me to his Obama endorsement: Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama - The Daily Beast.

It's good. Turns out he's a small government conservative and social libertarian. Who knew? I don't agree with those values (who shall care for the weak?), but I can work with 'em.

Buckley has been a McCain supporter for many years, but the Palin affair and McCain's courting of the fringe has broken him. He read Obama's books, and he switched.

So why doesn't he write this in the National Review?

That's an interesting story.

Turns out a fellow NR journalist wrote recently turned on Sarah Peron Palin. She started receiving Paul Krugman type email -- 12,000 hate messages from the loons of the right.

Buckley thinks he can dodge the hate mail. Maybe he can, those NR readers are pretty dim. They probably won't find his announcement.

So another moderate Republican has decided Palin/McCain is cracked, and Obama (remember how he praised Reagan? He's damned good.) is a remarkable man. That's good news, and a sign that the GOP has a reform constituency. We really need a strong, healthy, non-whacko GOP, so that's good.

There's more good news. McCain ran into some loons from my home state (Lakeville Minnesota, a growing exurban community with plummeting real estate values -- so lots of fear) at one of his rallies. He had a run in with one of the audience and ended up defending Obama and repudiating his own advertising campaign.

That would be mildly good news if it meant McCain had some vestiges of honor left [1], but there's better news than that.

The GOP's hate campaign, so far, isn't working as expected. Palin/McCain's disapproval rates are rising. The hate mobs are making the media nervous. Maybe the money people are starting to think what would happen if one of McCain's lunatics penetrated Obama's security perimeter. Whatever, the GOP is retracting.

So American's are not quite as susceptible to pure hate strategies as I'd thought. That's good.

So do I think Obama will win?

No.

All McCain has to do is play nice and beat on Palin a bit. Tone things down a tad, but run the same attacks in a stealthier manner. The media will fall over itself with relief that the "real McCain" is back. The GOP can then let the attacks simmer at a lower level.

So I still think McCain will win, Palin will become President, and America will shuffle off into the history books.

I confess, though, that Obama is doing better than I'd imagined. I feel good about the money we send him.

So here's the last bit of good news.

Obama is very good at this game. He knows what McCain and the GOP will do next. He'll be ready.

If anyone can get us out of this trap, it's Barack.

[1] The consensus is that McCain has been getting an earful from GOP moderates and donors. Personally, I wonder if his staff has been getting complaints from the Secret Service. They are, after all, protecting Obama from the loons.

It’s not Obama’s deficit

No great surprise, but even I’m surprised how relatively little Obama’s budgets have contributed to the Federal deficit …

How the U.S. Surplus Became a Deficit – David Leonhardt - NYTimes.com

… The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it…

…You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

So we’re talking 37% business cycle, 33% Bush, 20% Bush items extended by Obama (tax cuts, Iraq) and 10% Obama. It’s the last 10% that makes GOP budget “hawks” rabid.

Insofar that Obama’s spending is a stimulus package aimed at reducing the duration of the recession accounting for 37% of the deficit, it’s an excellent investment.

Obama and the white vote

Both The Economist and FiveThirtyEight report that Obama received only 43% of the (non-hispanic) white vote:

Great expectations | The Economist 

... Mr Obama lost the white vote, it is true, by 43-55%; but he won almost exactly same share of it as the last three (white) Democratic candidates; Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry....

On October 24th Obama was polling at 44% of the white vote, so the fear-and-smear of the Ayers-filled [1] two weeks before the vote didn't make a lot of difference (though 1% was huge in 2000).

From FiveThirtyEight we get more details on pale skin voting. Here are the Kerry and Obama numbers

Kerry: M (37%), F (44%), net (41%)
Obama: M (41%), F (45%), net (43%)

So The Economist isn't quite right. Obama did about the same as Kerry with white women, but much better than Kerry with white men. More women than men vote, so the big male boost only added 1%.

The last Democrat to win a majority of white voters was Lyndon Johnson -- before he became a champion of civil rights. So Obama did remarkably well by Democratic standards.

So whites prefer the GOP, but it's hard to tell whether this is tribalism or income related. Below $50K Obama support is very high, but you have to go over $200K to again get an Obama majority. Middle class Americans favor the GOP by 1-2%, which is enough to win an election. It's ironic, of course, that Obama's gets a support bump in the group that will be most affected by his tax increases.

john

[1] So now that it's all over, is he going to be able to sue anyone for libel?

Non-ethnic - a sign Obama did well on debate one

At first hearing, my jaw dropped ...

Talking Points Memo | Matthews

Matthews asked if it's weird that Obama was so 'non-ethnic' tonight.

On reflection, though, this is a good political sign.

These right wing commentators say aloud what their audience is thinking. Since "ethnic" is a dog whistle code word for "alien, black, Muslim*, scary, other" Matthews is effectively saying

Obama wasn't scary.

Matthews, a loyal GOP tribesman, has been telling his people Obama is scary. Now Matthew's people see that Obama isn't scary. Matthews is worried.

I sometimes read editorials that Obama needs to stop being cool, he needs to be passionate, angry, whatever.

Riiiiigggghhhht. Hate to break this to anyone, but Obama is, you know ... melanin positive. I trust he understands, by now, how to work the fear factor.

Obama did well at this debate. I still think McCain will be President, but Obama merits the money we give him. Time to send more.

*Update: I am an agnostic heathen who suspects that if any supernatural entities currently exist that they are unlikely to be friends to humanity. Obama is a more conventional Christian than McCain. I realized after writing this post that in the current bizarro world of American politics I needed to point this out.

Obama – leading us out of the darkness and the torture chamber

I lived 8 years under the rule of Cheney and Bush Jr. The darkness began to lift when the Dems took the Senate, but now I’m blinking into a rising sun.

I’m mostly stunned (emphases mine) …

Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' | World news | The Guardian

Barack Obama embarked on the wholesale deconstruction of George Bush's war on terror, shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition, and calling for a new set of rules for detainees. The repudiation of Bush's thinking on national security yesterday also saw the appointment of a high-powered envoy to the Middle East.

Obama's decision to permanently shut down the CIA's clandestine interrogation centres went far beyond the widely anticipated move to wind down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year.

He cast his scrapping of the legal apparatus set up by Bush as a way for America to reclaim the moral high ground in the fight against al-Qaida.

"We are not, as I said during the inauguration, going to continue with the false choice between our safety and our ideals," Obama said at the signing ceremony. "We intend to win this fight. We are going to win it on our own terms."

In a sign of the sweeping rejection of the legal standards set by Bush, officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday said the new administration would not be guided by any of the opinions on torture and detainees issued by the justice department after 11 September 2001.

Instead, Obama, in three executive orders, renewed the US commitment to the Geneva convention on the treatment of detainees. All detainees will be registered by the International Committee for the Red Cross, in another departure of past practice under the Bush administration.

… Another order directs the CIA to follow the US army field manual on interrogations, which bars such techniques as waterboarding…

… Obama followed up the burst of activity on detention policy by announcing that his administration would put resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the top of his agenda, "actively and aggressively" seeking a comprehensive peace deal. As a sign of that intent, he confirmed that former senator George Mitchell, a veteran US mediator, would be his Middle East envoy…

In contrast to this great post from The Guardian, Minnesota Public Radio spent most of today butchering a confused story about the restoration of US funding for international family planning. Maybe they’re even more stunned than I am.

This is a good day. All of our traditional investments have been devastated, but our investments in Obama’s election have already paid off.

Now that Obama has done his part, our task is to support the creation of an American Truth Commission and international efforts to prosecute Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Bush.

PS. In honor of President Obama, after more than five years of posting, I’ve added the tag called “government” – now that we have one worthy of the name.

Fox News jumps the shark?

Has Fox News, driven to frothing madness by Sarah Lynch Mob Peron, finally jumped the shark?

Op-Ed Columnist - Clearing the Ayers - NYTimes.com

… In my experience, most State Senate hopefuls are so thrilled at any sign of interest that they would happily attend a reception given by a homeless couple in their cardboard box. But even though Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weathermen were in the news, that house party puts all their misdeeds on his platter. Sarah Palin has been telling her increasingly scary rallies that he is somebody “who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists.”

Fox News, in a one-hour special on Obama’s associates hosted by Sean Hannity, came up with an “Internet journalist” named Andy Martin who has spent his life running bizarre political campaigns with occasional detours into the clink and filing lawsuits laced with paranoia and anti-Semitism. Based on this expertise, Martin deduced that Ayers was the puppet master of Obama’s rise in politics and that Obama’s community-organizer gig was actually training for “a radical overthrow of the government.”

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. When I was a college student, I believe I attended a party with Bernardine Dohrn. This was pre-Weather, when Dohrn was a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, better known as S.D.S. Some of my friends wanted to meet her because they were interested in establishing an S.D.S. chapter at our campus. I was opposed, under the presumption that S.D.S. meant Students for Decent Styles, a group that had been active in fighting spaghetti-strap dresses at my high school.

Still, under the new rules, I believe I may now be held partly responsible for all of Dohrn’s misdeeds, including aggravated battery, bail jumping, the Days of Rage and unreadable political tracts.

McCain’s favorite supporter, Senator Joseph Lieberman, recently called the Obama-Ayers connection “fair game.” This reminded me that Lieberman once came to a party at my house. It was years ago, when he was still a Connecticut state senator, and we have already established that state senators will go to anything. Still, I can’t help but feel that I am not only a potential victim of the new guilt-by-association standard, I am also somewhat complicit in establishing it.

Obama’s retaliation for the Ayers assault has been to remind voters that many years ago McCain was censured in the Senate for his relationship with Charles Keating, the rogue banker whose failed Lincoln Savings and Loan cost the taxpayers $2.6 billion at a time when $2.6 billion was really worth something.

When I was a teenager, Keating came to my Catholic girls high school in Cincinnati in his capacity as the founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-pornography group. His theme was the evil of wearing shorts in the summertime.

Keating said he knew a young mother who took her child for a walk while wearing Bermuda shorts. A motorist, overwhelmed with lust at the sight of the back of her uncovered calves, lost control of his car and slammed into them. Everybody was killed, and it was all her fault. We were then asked to sign pledge cards promising to conform to standards of modesty that would have satisfied the Taliban.

True, none of this really proves that I was responsible for the banking scandals of the 1980s. But if Barack Obama is responsible for the Weather Underground, and if the mother in Bermuda shorts was responsible for the car crash, I am pretty sure that I am on the hook as well.

Obama can’t say it of course, but the biggest American terrorists of the past 30 years were all on the right. They burned abortion clinics, and they blew up the Murrah building. In terms of terrorist associations, I suspect we’ll find McCain has more than a few in his closet – not even counting foreign leaders he’s worked with when he was more than 8 years old.

What will happen to Fox News if, though I think this is very unlikely, Obama wins?

David Brooks – Is Obama more like FDR, or more like Ronald Reagan?

Flying pigs are slip-sliding on the frozen fires of Hell.

David Books has written an extended essay praising Barack Obama. He compares Obama to his personal hero (Reagan) and to a man usually placed in the top 3 of great American presidents …

David Brooks - Thinking About Obama - NYTimes.com

… Some candidates are motivated by something they lack. For L.B.J., it was respect. For Bill Clinton, it was adoration. These politicians are motivated to fill that void. Their challenge once in office is self-regulation. How will they control the demons, insecurities and longings that fired their ambitions?

But other candidates are propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them. Candidates in this mold, most heroically F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes.

Obama has the biography of the first group but the personality of the second. He grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother. “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” This is supposed to produce a politician with gaping personal needs and hidden wounds.

But over the past two years, Obama has never shown evidence of that. Instead, he has shown the same untroubled self-confidence day after day…

I was annoyed when Obama praised Reagan, but I didn’t write anything.

Obama is a brilliant political tactician. True, Palin/McCain will still win, but nobody could do better than he’s done.

Brooks appears to be nerving himself to endorse Obama. Even if he doesn’t, those pigs are still spinning.

Obama vs. Cheney is as simple as Good vs. Evil

I really am a shades of gray guy.

Sometimes, though, the shades are pretty extreme.

The Obama vs. Cheney speeches are about as simple as good vs. evil.

No, Cheney's not (yet) a mass murderer. He does, however, want America to travel a road well worn by evil regimes. He champions an evil cause.

No, Obama is far from a saint. He does, however, call on America to remember its nobility.

It's rare to have such a clear choice.

Obama stands firm on closing Guantanamo |World news | guardian.co.uk

Barack Obama today laid out a broad case for closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and banning the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been condemned as torture – while accusing his opponents of wanting to scare Americans to win political battles.

In a grand hall at the US national archives, standing directly in front of original copies of the US constitution and declaration of independence, Obama said the current legal and political battles in Washington over the fate of the 240 prisoners there stemmed not from his decision to close the facility, but from George Bush's move seven years ago to open it...

... , Dick Cheney gave a rebuttal at a conservative Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The former vice-president defended many of the Bush administration policies Obama is now unraveling, and mentioned either "September 11" or "9/11" 25 times.

Cheney said Saddam Hussein had "known ties" to terrorists, an apparent rehashing of the widely discredited Bush administration effort to link the Iraqi dictator to the September 11 2001 hijackers.

... Obama today said that indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay and the prison's harsh interrogation methods had undermined the rule of law, alienated America from the rest of the world, served as a rallying cry and recruiting symbol for terrorists, risked the lives of American troops by making it less likely enemy combatants would surrender, and increased the likelihood American prisoners of war would be mistreated. The camp's existence discouraged US allies from cooperating in the fight against international terrorism, he said.

"There is also no question that Guantánamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world," he said. "Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al-Qaida that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law."

Calling Guantánamo "a mess, a misguided experiment", he condemned the re-emergence of bitter political fighting over the prison and the future of its 240 inmates.

"We will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue," he said. "Listening to the recent debate, I've heard words that are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country."

... He acknowledged that a number of Guantánamo prisoners could not be prosecuted yet posed a clear threat to the US: those who had trained at al-Qaida camps, commanded Taliban troops, pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden and sworn to kill Americans.

"These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States," he said.

He pledged to construct a new legal framework to deal with those prisoners, saying that if they warranted long-term detention the decision should be made not by the president alone but with congressional and judicial oversight...

One day your children may ask, did you stand with evil or with good.

Now is the time you will determine your answer.

Obama knows what he’s doing – calming the right …

I didn’t like the Warren choice, but I’ve been worried about culture shock on the right. Maybe Obama, who is perhaps a bit better at politics than I am, has been worried too. Maybe he’s been trying to calm their anxieties.

Maybe it’s working …

In McCain Country, Acceptance of Obama Grows

… In interviews in the week leading up to Mr. Obama’s inauguration, many people here said a tolerant spirit toward his presidency has been hastened, paradoxically, by some of the same groups that voted mostly Republican in the election. Those include active or former military personnel, and people who identify themselves as evangelical Christians, two groups with traditions of respecting hierarchical order and strong leadership…

… Leonard Nelson, 63, a 23-year veteran of both the Army and the Navy, said he had voted for Mr. McCain mainly through military fealty, believing that Mr. McCain’s own military record would make him a better commander in chief.

“But I’ve come to think the better man won,” said Mr. Nelson, owner of the Humidor Cigar Shop, an aromatic haven of pipes, blended tobaccos and customers on a first-name basis. Mr. Nelson said that Mr. Obama, through his cabinet selections, sent a signal of centrist government intention that feels all right to him.,,

… At one of the city’s biggest evangelical megachurches, Victory Christian Center, with 17,000 members, there were also mixed messages of enthusiasm.

The church’s pastor and founder, Billy Joe Daugherty, said that the selection of the Rev. Rick Warren, a prominent evangelical minister from California, to give the inaugural invocation went a long way to easing fears in Mr. Daugherty’s mostly conservative congregation about a liberal social agenda…

“What I’m sensing from Obama in making the choice he did — he’s saying to all groups, ‘Why don’t we come together?’ ” Mr. Daugherty said in an interview…

When Bush “won” in 2000, he acted as though he’d won by Obama’s 2008 margin. Obama, who really did win big, behaves like he just squeaked by and needs every vote.

What’s next, a visit to Limbaugh?

We don’t deserve this President, but I’ve never been in favor of getting what we deserve.

I find this all very hard to believe …

Minnesota's caucus and Florida's 71 to 22 percent preference: Clinton wins.

If I had the only vote in America, I'd probably vote for John Edwards. Otherwise, If he passed much more study than I've bothered with to date, Barack Obama.

Alas, I don't have the only vote in America. So my "vote" in the oddball Minnesota caucuses next Tuesday will be for whoever is most likely to beat Romney and/or McCain. That means whoever is mostly likely to win Florida, because, yet again, Florida will decide who the next President will be.

So I searched for a reference to guide me, and I found this ...

American Research Group

January 27, 2008 - Florida Primary Preferences

... Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama among men 59% to 25%, with 13% for John Edwards, and she leads Obama 61% to 28% among women, with 6% for John Edwards. Clinton leads Obama among early voters 65% to 19% and she leads Obama among in-person voters 58% to 31%, with 8% for Edwards. Clinton leads among white voters with 64%, with Obama at 21% and Edwards at 11%. Obama leads Clinton among African American voters 71% to 21%. And Clinton leads among Hispanic voters with 71%, with Obama at 22% and Edwards at 1%.

My recollection is that, in Florida, it's the Hispanic voters that decide presidential contests.

So it's Clinton then. My personal preferences don't count.

Update: for a biting and darkly humorous perspective with a similar (implied) conclusion, read Jon Swift.

The New Yorker: Obama for reasons of character

Of course the New Yorker favors Obama over McCain. It's remarkable, though, how long their list of Obama's advantages is. It's piling on, really.

At last they get to character ...

The Choice: Comment: The New Yorker

.... What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin ...
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness...

McCain is half way to frothing loon. Ok, 75% of the way. Palin is showing a pretty nasty lying streak of her own, one that fits what we've read of her political rise. The resemblance to Cheney is pretty creepy.

And yet, I still think America will elect McCain and Palin...

Donate to Obama.

The Economist's endorsement: What's surprising about it.

The Economist has been running a world "electoral college" . Last I looked 80% of their US readers voted for Obama.

80%.

That's current readers of The Economist, a journal that used to be rationalist 19th century liberal but became a pale imitation of the Wall Street Journal editorial pages in the 90s. Even this readership, the very heart of McCain's former constituency, is massively pro-Obama.

So I figured the "paper" would endorse Obama. If 80% of the US readership of a WSJed-lite publication wants Obama, they aren't going to be stupid.

Still, in 2000 they endorsed Bush. They never adequately apologized.

In 2004, they weakly, half-heartedly, with poisoned pen, "endorsed" John Kerry as "the incoherent".

So I was expecting a grudging, muttered, meaningless endorsement.

Instead we got ...

Obama on the cover, striding along. Headline "It's time".

There's nothing poisonous about this endorsement (emphasis mine):

An endorsement of Barack Obama | It's time | The Economist

... all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly ...

"Wholeheartedly". A carefully chosen word.

They are not forgiven. They will never be forgiven for their 2000 endorsement of GWB.

Still.

It's something.

McCain's effective lies and the post-fact society

The McCain campaign campaign is lying low and high, left and right, and they're not even bothering to cover their tracks.

Is Farhad Manjoo right that we live in a post-fact society?

Why doesn't Barack Obama lie more often? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

... In my book True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call "media fragmentation"—the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio—lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don't, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it's clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.

In particular, McCain is feeding off long-held conservative antipathy to the mainstream news media, the same force that propelled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth four years ago. The Swift Boat message was conceived on talk radio; in the months before they caught the attention of TV producers, the vets appeared on hundreds of local radio stations across the country to push the story that the media wasn't telling the whole truth about Kerry. By the time they'd raised enough money to run TV ads, the Swift Vets had built up a huge network of people ready to defend their claims. These networks managed to render fact-checking not just ineffective, but countereffective—when newspapers pointed out flaws in the Swift Vets' claims, the Vets' defenders would pounce, arguing that the very act of fact-checking proved that the media was in the tank for Kerry.

The same dynamic is at work in the Palin rollout: "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent," Republican strategist John Feehery told the Washington Post. "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

Obama has inherent, obvious disadvantages in pushing a message in which "little facts don't really matter." For one thing, he's boxed in by his oft-repeated search for a different kind of politics. But given the tenor of the campaign, Obama's audience might be happy to see him take the low road. In the past, Democratic voters have been willing to accept lies. Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2004, the Kerry campaign managed to convince Americans that 3 million jobs had been lost during George W. Bush's first term (at the time of the election, it was less than 2 million) and that Bush "favored sending American jobs overseas." (He didn't.) Kerry and others on the left repeated these claims often, and in time they took root.

The misstatements of 2004 suggest a category of lies that Obama could get away with—ones that the public is already primed to believe about McCain. McCain's signature policy goal is cutting out earmarks. But as the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen points out, in promising to veto all earmarks, McCain has inadvertently called for cutting some popular programs—including all U.S. assistance to Israel, which is technically provided through a kind of earmark. Of course McCain doesn't really want to stop giving aid to Israel; an ad that suggested McCain's cost-cutting zeal would lead to abandoning Israel would be as dishonest as McCain's sex-ed ad. But it might also be effective, reinforcing the idea that McCain wants to cut too much.

Or what about that 100-years war? Picture an Obama ad showing McCain saying that the war in Iraq will last 100—or even 1,000!—years. The ad patches in footage of McCain singing "bomb Iran" and describing all the devastating effects of war. Actually, that ad exists—a comedy group posted it on YouTube in February. Nearly 2 million people have watched it. It's hilarious, effective, and a complete lie. Obama's advisers should be pushing him to approve that message.

It's another version of the Strauss Gap. The GOP knows that the American people aren't all that concerned about what's true any more. Post-fact society? I'll buy that.

If the American people don't rediscover an interest in mere reality pretty damned soon, Obama will have to join the McCain lie train.

Post-fact society? Not enlightenment 2.0. Not good.

Dark times indeed.

Update 11/6/2008: Was I wrong? Damn, but I was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. See also. Yee-hah. I was wrong. Obama, you were right. I'm so glad you're going to be President and I'm not.

Obama's addiction is a problem

Obama has been unable to break his cigarette addiction.

Obama Noncommittal on Caroline Kennedy, and Smoking

...On another matter, Mr. Brokaw tried to clarify whether Mr. Obama has actually quit smoking, as he suggested.

The president-elect admitted to having “fallen off the wagon.”...

So he's sending money to Satan. This should please Philip Morris, maybe they'll send Obama some freebies.

He's not the first president with a substance problem of course, but at least Bush had put his aside.

I hope he finds a way to do better. It won't be the last of his clay feet of course, anyone insane enough to run for President has more problems than addiction.

This particular addiction, however, does make him a crappy role model for our kids. We'll need to reduce Obama's prominence in our household conversations.

PS. Although I think claims of liberal media bias are overrated, the careful skirting of Obama's cigarette problem does support a bias claim. Of course I didn't mention anything prior to the election, but I don't pretend to be unbiased.

Good news: McCain/Palin play the Ayers Card

The timing of McCain/Peron'sPalin's "Ayers attack" is good news ...

Palin, on Offensive, Attacks Obama’s Ties to ’60s Radical - NYTimes.com

.... The article to which she referred, in The New York Times on Saturday, traced Mr. Obama’s sporadic interactions with Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weathermen who later became an education professor in Chicago and worked on education projects there with Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president.

The article said: “A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.”..

No surprise here, though they'd probably have preferred that Ayers weren't a relatively respectable tenured professor. Obama, of course, was a toddler when Ayers was in trouble. McCain has buddied up with nastier foreign leaders as a grown man.

We should expect lots of "Osama oops I meant Obama" slips of the tongue and a 100% increase in lying during this predictable smear campaign.

The good news is the timing. They would normally keep this one until about 1-2 weeks before a close election, then hammer it hard giving no time for the lies to fall flat. McCain would only play this now if he felt he was going to lose.

So the timing is good news.

That doesn't mean it won't work. This country almost elected Bush over Gore (with ample help from the GOP's Ralph Nader), and we elected a 2nd term Bush over Kerry (with less help from the GOP's Nader).

I predict we'll elect McCain/Palin. McCain, whose medical records have not been released and who has had no known cognitive testing, will be found to have early dementia and recurrent melanoma. President Palin will take office in late 2009.

I'm kind of hoping Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula will find a way to join up with Canada ...