Marbury

dressin' like a real vp

Chuck Todd at NBC covers the latest bad polling news for McCain-Palin, before reporting that the McCain campaign bought Sarah Palin a new wardrobe:

If these poll numbers weren't bad enough for Palin, now comes a Politico report noting that the RNC spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize her at high-end stores like Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue -- a story that could further add to the perception that Palin isn't a serious candidate. The campaign released a statement last night that seemed to confirm the report: "With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it's remarkable that we're spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses. It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign."

Or maybe they'll put them on eBay.

misspelling it out

Crazy McCain supporters fly a banner over an Obama rally in Miami, Florida. It reads BARAK REPUDIATE AYRES - MICHELLE REPUDIATE DOHRN. At least they spelt repudiate correctly.

what does sarah want?

John Dickerson attempts to analyse some of Sarah Palin's recent statements to ascertain if she's deliberately distancing herself from John McCain. He ends up confused. My own interpretation is very simple, and you don't have to look very deep for it. As Peggy Noonan put it, Palin is just...saying things.

Having said that, there is a strong case for Palin being the most likely GOP nominee in 2012 if they lose this time. She's the only person capable of making Mike Huckabee look like a snooty intellectual.

early voting story

A reader emails Ben Smith:

I voted today. I'm a 33 year old, white criminal defense lawyer in southwest Kansas. The early voting is at the courthouse. I arrive to find 12 old white people occupying all the voting machines. I wait. A machine opens up. The 80 something white male who had been using the machine is now up at the front table asking if he can vote again. The lady running the table says "no, one person, one vote." He replies, "well, I just want to make sure we don't have some terrorist running the country."

This obviously catches my attention so I look at the old man. Our eyes meet. He points a bony finger at me and says, "Don't let it happen." Thinking this old man could one day kill someone and need my services, I don't say anything and proceed to vote.

As I'm leaving the voting room, the young black janitor is in the hallway in front of the room with his cleaning cart. "Did you do the right thing?" he asks me. "You know it." I say and we exchange a terrorist fist jab.

stalemate

If you want an illustration of why America's political culture isn't likely to get past its polarisation just because Obama wins in November then you couldn't do much better than watch this encounter. It features David Frum, a thoughtful conservative writer and pundit who has come out against the McCain campaign largely because of the Palin factor, and Rachel Maddow, presenter of a liberal MSNBC show. Frum admits his own side's failings, but suggests - correctly in my view - that it takes two to dance this tango. Maddow gives not an inch. In fact, she seems not to understand what he's on about. There's a kind of icy implacability to her demeanour that suggests she won't be stepping outside the moral matrix any time soon.

likeable enough

This, from the latest New York Times/CBS poll, is good news for Obama, especially given his newness to the national scene:

Mr. Obama’s favorability is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years of Times/CBS polls.

In other words, he's as likeable as Reagan was at the equivalent stage. Meanwhile, it turns out that Sarah Palin is no Dan Quayle:

Mrs. Palin’s negative rating is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. Even Dan Quayle, with whom Mrs. Palin is often compared because of her age and inexperience on the national scene, was not viewed as negatively in the 1988 campaign.

a simple 'yes' would have done it...

I tend to think that in well-run, winning presidential campaigns the candidate's top aides don't give long, rambling, undisciplined interviews in which they rage against the press and their opponent and just the whole big bad world.

So this Atlantic interview with McCain's speechwriter, top adviser and best friend Mark Salter hardly disproves my supposition. Favourite bit:

JG: Does McCain hold Obama in contempt?

MS: No, that's absolutely false.

JG: Does he respect him?

MS: There are things he respects about Obama.

alternative histories

Ambinder, writing admiringly of the Obama team's ability to frame each contest on their terms (change versus experience up against Clinton, cool head versus hot head against McCain) concludes his post by asking what would have happened if McCain's team had found their frame early and stuck to it:

It's true; most of McCain's biggest wounds have been self-inflicted. But imagine, if you will, that the McCain campaign had decided to stick with just one storyline  about Obama, beginning in the summertime: that he is indecisive and weak, and never takes a stand on real issues.

Forget the Ayers stuff, the Wright stuff, the kindergarten stuff: they could have made his "present" votes the centerpiece of their attack, along with a whole host of supporting anecdotes. 

Meanwhile, McCain could have been framed as a bold leader, independent of both parties, who took unpopular stands time and time again.  In that instance, the reaction to both the VP picks and to the candidates' actions after Lehman collapsed would probably have been interpreted very, very differently.

Albeit with the benefit of hindsight, that sounds pretty good to me. Given the state of his party McCain was always going to face an uphill struggle, but he might have kept this closer, or even be winning, if he'd taken this approach. Any successful framing must be rooted in a strong element of truth. That's why the Obama-as-dangerous-radical stuff doesn't cut it. But Obama-as-wuss, well, there is something to that. He hasn't yet really taken on his party or its allies on any significant issue. On education, for instance, he's toyed with confronting teacher union shibboleths but never quite gone for it, as David Brooks has chronicled. And that 'present' stuff is difficult to explain away without getting lost in procedural niceties that voters don't give a stuff about.

I'm not saying that this would or should have worked - but I do think McCain would be in a better place now if he'd stuck his flag here and not moved it every week as he has done.

Award for the most ironic statement of the campaign: ""I'm afraid Senator Obama doesn't understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy."

division vs unity

In her wayward, free-associatin' style Palin has bumbled into what I think might be quite a significant error by referring to "pro-America areas" of the nation. Though I think - to be generous - she was attempting to reprise her praise of small-town America rather than be overtly divisive, her clumsy expression has handed something of a gift to the Obama campaign. It couldn't play better into Obama's theme of unity/one nation. I can see him using this on the stump: "Our opponents would slice and dice us into pro-American areas and anti-Americans areas. I say we are all pro-American in this great nation, and it's time to stop the politics of division."

Added to a McCain adviser's desperate attempt to mark off "real Virginia" from Democrat Virginia, and one or two other things like this crazylady rant and you have quite a potent line of attack for the Obama campaign, handed to them by their opponents.

a sledgehammer blow

Mike Murphy is a Republican strategist and one of John McCain's closest allies over the years, though he has played no role in this campaign. Here's what he has to say about Powell:

I am not normally of the view that endorsements mean much in Presidential politics. But Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama today is a real sledgehammer blow to the already staggering McCain campaign. Not just because a Powell endorsement shores up Obama's shaky foreign policy bona fides, but even more because of the content of Powell's remarks on Meet the Press. The General showed he still knows how to launch a brutal offense. Powell's remarks were an across the board indictment of the McCain campaign. He threw a subtly delivered but perfectly targeted series of chops at each of the the major fractures of the shaky McCain campaign; the Palin choice, the dark tone of the campaign, the Helter Skelter antics at the onset of the economic crisis. As a great McCain admirer, I am sad to say it, but the truth is the video of Powell's endorsement will boil across You Tube and do great damage in these closing days of the campaign.

aftershock

Taking a question outside the studio after his endorsement, Powell is even more impassioned in his indictment of McCain's campaign and the increasingly hysterical tone of the GOP's attacks on its opponents. This is as much about Powell's dismay at the path taken by his own party in recent years as it is about McCain vs Obama.

the p-bomb drops...

...And makes quite an explosion. Watching Colin Powell on Meet The Press today, you get the distinct impression that that this endorsement carries more weight than most, not least because of the passion and eloquence with which Powell delivers it. In seven minutes of uninterrupted talking, without pauses or stumbles, he delivers a fluent, well argued, utterly convincing paean of praise to Obama, and a quietly devastating critique of McCain's competence and judgement; on the economy, Palin, and campaign tactics. There is, for McCain, an ominous finality to this verdict.

It couldn't be a better day for Obama - his campaign has just announced a staggering, crazily huge fundraising total for September. No wonder they are crushing their opponents in the ad wars.

kicking a man when he's down

From a report in today's New York Times about about the massive gap in ad spending between the Obama and McCain campaigns.

nailin' palin

The peerless Peggy Noonan has written an elegant evisceration of Sarah Palin that is all the more convincing because it comes from one who was initially enthusiastic about Palin when she first emerged, and wanted very much to believe in her. The piece should be read in full, but here's my favourite bit:

She doesn't think aloud. She just . . . says things.

Her supporters accuse her critics of snobbery: Maybe she's not a big "egghead" but she has brilliant instincts and inner toughness. But what instincts? "I'm Joe Six-Pack"? She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation—"palling around with terrorists." If the Ayers case is a serious issue, treat it seriously. She is not as thoughtful or persuasive as Joe the Plumber, who in an extended cable interview Thursday made a better case for the Republican ticket than the Republican ticket has made. In the past two weeks she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn't, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.

obama's cool head

In a sign of where we are in the race, the NYT's conservative columnist David Brooks writes a great column on the temperament and potential of Obama whilst barely mentioning McCain. Indeed the only contest in Brooks's column is between two possible President Obama's:

...it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem...

...It could be that Obama will be an observer, not a leader. Rather than throwing himself passionately into his causes, he will stand back. Congressional leaders, put off by his supposed intellectual superiority, will just go their own way. Lost in his own nuance, he will be passive and ineffectual. Lack of passion will produce lack of courage. The Obama greatness will give way to the Obama anti-climax.

Overall it reads like a cautious, qualified endorsement based on Obama's impressive temperament. The New Yorker's George Packer writes a post that also extolls the virtues of Obama's temperament and makes a similar point about his "lack of passion":

Obama’s character is a political triumph. His cool, unlike McCain’s tic-filled anger, is tactically deployed; throughout the campaign it’s become his main weapon against crisis and attack. But if he wins, he’ll need to play far more of his psychic register to have any chance of succeeding at the impossible job he’s so skillfully pursued. He’ll have to draw on humor, on empathy, on audacity, on courage, in order to inspire the kind of confidence the country badly lacks and needs. He might even have to get angry.