The last hurdles

[Political Waves]

With only 16 days to go, you've seen what the Right is using to slow up Obama's sweep -- race and voting issues. The McCain buzzwords ... which include everything from the far, dark corner under the kitchen sink ... are hateful and frightening to the base -- now it's "welfare" and "socialism." Mac continues to be rash with this mouth, alienating those who aren't on his narrow, Red path. Consider:

"At least in Europe, the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives," McCain said in his weekly radio address. "They use real numbers and honest language. And we should demand equal candor from Sen. Obama. Raising taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut it's just another government giveaway."

That's a quote from an article indicating that Obama drew 100,000 in St. Louis yesterday; 75,000 in Kansas City later in the day. As Obama opens up the world to unifying possibilities, McCain insults Europe, as he did Spain not too long ago. We will NOT survive this century if we continue to exclude and alienate. Old McPoopyPants is the cranky voice of continuing the national isolation George Bush made an art form.

CNN's Blitzer noticed that too, throwing it for comment to Missouri swing-state's Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt -- Matt Blunt, Roy's boy and our quickly expiring Governor, told us on Face the Nation this morning that Sarah Palin was a perfect candidate for the Show Me state. On CNN, Roy defended Palin's notion that small towns [Pea Patch style] are the home to real, pro-Americans [make that culturally conservative and religious.] Absurd!

 

The Blunt's are just that ... Neanderthal's of a quickly fading era. Missouri is a bellwether -- McCain currently leads by a single point and it's dicey that he can hold it; the turnout for O yesterday set a national record. As well, Obama has turned so many traditionally Red states that bellwethers may not have much punch this time. In case you missed it -- all truism's are moot, this time.

The big news of the race today is Colin Powell's endorsement of O as a 'transformational figure' prepared to lead the country. He spoke of the generational shift, he mentioned the larger topics of Supreme Court nominations and international goodwill -- he was effusive about Obama and as enthusiastically damning of his own party. The question concerning moderates of all stripes ... even those not effected by race ... has been Obama's readiness and experience; Powell just put that the bed.

 

And only the dense would not see that Colin's endorsement is the military-mind rejecting the out-of-touch military-model; that can't be ignored. Troops are now sending 4 times the money to O than McCain; Powell's selection won't surprise them, but it may surprise a few others. And while endorsements at this late date don't carry too big a punch, this one may.

An interesting article on the power of endorsement tells us that while it may or may not sway voters, it certainly represents their local attitudes. When I mentioned to a retired MO state assemblywoman yesterday [at a Dem PAC meeting] that the Chicago Trib had come out for Obama ... their first ever Dem endorsement ... she sucked in her breath in surprise. That's stunning -- and so are the totals of newspapers favoring O; you'll find a list below. Obama leads 62 to McCain's 18, with a number in Republican territory, including Salt Lake and Denver. Here are some links to explore:

The Chicago Tribune endorsed it's first Democrat, adding, "We are proud to add Barack Obama's name to Lincoln's in the list of people the Tribune has endorsed for president of the United States."

The LA Times says, "He is the competent, confident leader who represents the aspirations of the United States."

Esquire's first-ever endorsement
 

Christopher Hitchens goes for Obama

Buckley Jr. endorsed Obama and then resigned from his position on Dad's political journal, the National Review

There's a long list of GOP "betrayers"

McCain is getting a little bounce now; it was to be expected as those who have sat out the war take their position against the dreaded interloper and respond to the fear-speak. I doubt that many of these are undecided votes. Obama should get a similar spike, now that Powell has played his card with a flourish.

 

As you watch the polls, forget about what Mac's getting -- keep an eye on O's numbers: they're steady, they don't shift downward. As long as they stay constant or shift up -- he's already won.

The Kid [that's what we call Brian, the young Obama organizer who is headquartered at Fishin' Jims until the election] called the other day to convince me to coordinate the last push for county turnout in this crunch period; he was upset to hear I wouldn't be in the Pea Patch for the vote. It's time for my yearly trek home; I've already voted absentee, and I'll leave for California the end of October to celebrate the family Fall birthdays and get my [seriously missed and oh-so-necessary] quota of heart-connect.

Brian seemed glum, which betrays his exhaustion and the unyielding challenge that is the Patch; as well, Obama has sternly warned all his folks not to count on anything, to work as if every vote counts and he's still the underdog. Which brings us to the hurdles.

Topics of race require one to pull into abstract thought; Dem's anyhow, who are horrified at the tone of the rhetoric coming from the other side. This kind of energy is mindless, dangerous and illogical; you can't "convince" a racist.

 

Happily, racism is not what is driving this election -- economy is.

I'm posting a piece below about Western Pennsylvania, part of that corridor of white reluctance, that makes me wince ... every time I read it. But it is emblematic of where we are, with America's warts in plain sight. And please note, as you wince ... and you will ... that even as raw as it is, it breaks the racial paradigm. If and when Obama wins this race, we will have cut the thread that binds us to one of our oldest Karmic obligations and Achilles Heel's and allows us to move into a new appreciation of diversity and modernity; it can't come too soon!

As for McCain, the reason he's gone to notions of socialism is that, when Obama's response to Joe the Plumber gave him opportunity, he could pounce on the Commie, better-dead-than-Red scare-words to sway the elders. It's the elder generation now that is keeping Mac alive; those lost in the honor of World War II [which, for some reason, is more emotionally associated with McCain than his own experience in Vietnam.] Some will not budge on this, locked in the past; but there are many, many elders that see Obama as hope for American restoration. Florida is the bellwether on that topic; who'da thunk it?!

Be assured, the GOP bravado in the face of the Obama sociopolitical movement is as bogus as Joe the Plumber.

In the Washington offices of the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, anxious staff members spend more times polishing their resumes than working towards the November election.

While claiming publicly they will "fight to the end," the GOP is in full retreat, sensing a landslide that will not only sweep Barack Obama into the White House but will add to Democratic majorities in Congress.

One RNC staff member circulates a daily email called "The Death Watch."  It contains the latest poll numbers that show GOP Presidential nominee John McCain falling further and further behind.

"It's over," says one angry Republican operative. "McCain has blown it."

A few reads, below -- two on racism; then Frank Rich, who did a good job of skewering Mac this weekend. After that, heads up on voter issues, as well as Obama's call for investigation that links current voter purging to Ninegate ... he has a mind like a trap; as the Rolling Stone interview indicated, he doesn't mind being underestimated. It works in his favor ... AND ours. As well, RFK Jr. and Greg Palast give us disturbing details on the continued occulting of votes by the GOP machine -- open the links, do diligence.

IMHO, this election will either be a stunning sweep in November ... or another of those edge-of-chair legal wrangles that we saw postpone a winner for days on end in 2000. The security of the vote will tell that tale.

 

McCain might have one chance, slim at best -- if he fired everyone in his poisoned campaign, and showed us more of that guy that traded jokes with Obama at the dinner for Al Smith, he might turn some heads ... but it would likely come too late to stop the actual Straight Talk Express that Obama's riding straight into the Oval Office.

Just a note on my personal schedule -- I will likely be even less attentive to you in the next ten days, but once I shift to California, I should be more present; I will have access to a faster computer and more uncommitted time.

Jude



On the Road: Western Pennsylvania
Friday, October 17, 2008
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-western-pennsylvania.html

"I walked five miles to get out of Pittsburgh, and two rides, an apple truck and a big trailer truck, took me to Harrisburg in the soft Indian-summer rainy night. I cut right along. I wanted to get home.. That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out. Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof?"

- Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

In this economy, racism is officially a luxury. How is John McCain going to win if he can't win those voters? John Murtha's "racist" western Pennsylvania district, where this story takes place, is some of the roughest turf in the nation. But Barack Obama is on the ground and making inroads due to unusually strong organizing leadership.

In Washington County, a bellwether in this traditional swing state that John Kerry carried by a mere 552 votes out of over 96,000 cast, the Obama campaign's mood is optimistic but very cautious. The campaign has registered over 4,000 new voters in this county, and enough statewide since the primary season to push the Democratic registration edge to over 1.2 million.

Still, Barack Obama wasn't competitive in the primary, and getting volunteers, knocks and phone calls was tough over the summer. "After the primary many of the Obama supporters were tired and were enjoying their summer," according to longtime resident and Obama Neighborhood Team Leader Greg Roth, whose house was used as a staging location during the primary. "Also, it took some time for some of the Hillary supporters come around."

As the campaign shifts into GOTV (get out the vote) mode, its universe of targeted voters begins to change. "We know who our voters are," said Roth. "Now we just have to go get them to vote." Asked if the racism resistance to Obama would inhibit volunteer effort here, "We had probably 200 people last night show up to our GOTV training in Washington, and it's a complete 180 from the tough summer months."

Over in Indiana, PA and Northern Cambria, PA, volunteers fielded complaints of a massive wave of ugly robocalls both paid for by John McCain's campaign and those paid for by third parties. The third party call was interactive, and purported to be from Barack Obama himself. The call starts out reasonably, and then "Obama" asks what the listener thinks is the most important issue. Whatever the response, "Obama" then launches into a profane and crazed tirade using "n***er" and other shock language.

From what we've seen, this IS the McCain ground campaign. Robocalls count as "touches" on voters, as do direct mail pieces such as this one. As David Plouffe said in today's fundraising letter to supporters, "These tactics are all that the McCain campaign and their allies have left."

In Pittsburgh, we attended Michelle Obama speech at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial on Pitt's campus. The crowd received her with adoration, and she didn't disappoint, delivering a 45-minute speech to an assembled group of roughly 2,000 on the personal nature of the economic crisis, education, costs of the Iraq War, and health care. She urged the audience not to get complacent, even as polls in Pennsylvania showed a widening race. Work "as if we're 20 points behind," she said.

"Barack Obama, as far as I'm concerned, was always the underdog. He is still the underdog, will be the underdog until the day he's sitting in the Oval Office. We take nothing for granted."

Strongly directed from the candidate himself, Obama's campaign organizers are taking nothing for granted, and the relentless organizing beat goes on. To accommodate the more spread out nature of the turf in west-central PA, over in the more rural upper half of Cambria County, Obama's aggressive campaign has organized its volunteers to improvise with phonebank and canvass staging locations out of apartments and offices after-hours.

"Our first night about a month ago," said volunteer Jim Sabella, "about four of us huddled around a one-bulb lamp to make calls." The apartment the volunteers used for the phonebank hadn't even had the electricity turned back on yet, and so they had to improvise. "We patched it through from the neighbors with an extension cord and just decided, we will do whatever it takes. Enough is enough, and we can't take another four years like the last eight." Now well-lit, the phone bank hosts several volunteers nearly every night of the week.

Eighteen days. Philly burbs, here we come. ++


Racists for Obama?
Ben Smith, Politico
October 18, 2008
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0E40664B-18FE-70B2-A89538DF1216BA5C

New polling and a trickle of stories from the battleground states suggest that Sen. Barack Obama's coalition includes one unlikely group: white voters with negative views of African-Americans.

Race has become the elephant in the room of the 2008 presidential campaign, with Obama's prospect of becoming the first black president drawing some Americans closer to him while pushing others away. At times, the contest has slipped into a familiar dynamic of allegations of racism and outraged denial - but it's also challenged some easy assumptions about race, racism and prejudice.

"What you see is it's perfectly possible to hold a negative view of at least one aspect of African-Americans and yet simultaneously prefer Obama," said Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Racial feelings are not as cut and dried - not as black and white - as people often say."

Franklin explored those contradictions in a large, national survey taken in mid-September, when the Illinois Democratic senator's rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), led in many polls and the nation's economic woes had not yet produced a deep crisis. The poll asked voters whether they agreed with the statement that "African-Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing." About a fifth of white voters said they "strongly agreed." Yet among those who agreed, 23 percent said they'd be supporting Obama.

"This result is reasonable if you believe that race is not as monolithic an effect as we might easily assume," Franklin said, noting that 22 percent of those who "strongly disagreed" said they'd be supporting McCain.

Anecdotes from across the battlegrounds suggest that there's a significant minority of prejudiced white voters who will swallow hard and vote for the black man.

"I wouldn't want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I'm voting for  Obama," the wife of a retired Virginia coal miner, Sharon Fleming, told the
Los Angeles Times recently.

One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are . undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

The notion that there might be "racists for Obama," as one Democrat called them, comes against the backdrop of a country whose white voters largely accept the notion of a black president.

"The economy is trumping racism," said Kurt Schmoke, the dean of Howard University Law School and a former Baltimore mayor. "A lot of people who we might think wouldn't vote their pocketbook because of race - now they are."

"If you go to a white neighborhood in the suburbs and ask them, 'How would you feel about a large black man kicking your door in,' they would say, 'That doesn't sound good to me,'" said Democratic political consultant Paul Begala. "But if you say, 'Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black,' it's a different situation."

"The house is on fire, and one guy seems like he's calm and confident and in charge, and that's the only option," he said.

That is, in less dramatic terms, more or less the campaign's official talking point, a version of the longtime Democratic hope that class will -
or at least should - matter more than race.

"Voters are less interested in the hot button and are more interested in the cooling economy," said Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), an Obama ally who is as on-message as his father is off.

But other, more nuanced, questions of race are also in play.

One senior congressional Democrat mused about prejudice among his own supporters. "They've all got one black friend," he said, "and they won't
stop talking about their black friend."

"That's Obama," he said.

And some argue that elements of Obama's story and persona make him specifically acceptable to voters who hold broadly negative views of
African-Americans.

"Not all whites associate the generic African-American with Obama," said Ron Walters, a longtime student of race and politics and aide to the senior Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns. "They give him credit for having half a Caucasian ancestry, and give him credit for his education, and give him credit for his obvious ability to take complex subjects and parse them."

The geography of racial conflict and tolerance has been a strong overlay of the electoral map. Obama has run better than past Democrats in prosperous states with little history of tension, such as Colorado and Iowa, and worse in working-class states in the Appalachian belt. His campaign has been structured around this dynamic and may actually have overestimated the number of white Democrats in the region unwilling to vote for him because of his race. Obama had ignored West Virginia, for instance, until a spate of positive polls prompted him to start advertising there this week.

Obama has also ignored Southern states with a history of deep racial division, from Arkansas to Mississippi, in favor of those that have seen an influx of new voters from the north -  Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.

Until this fall, both campaigns viewed Michigan - a heavily Democratic state, but one with a history of tension between Detroit and its white suburbs - as Obama's Achilles' heel. In 2006, the state was deeply divided by a referendum to ban affirmative action. The measure was opposed by most African-American voters as an assault on hard-won gains, but it won broad support among whites and passed by a double-digit margin.

But earlier this month, McCain gave up the state for lost as economic concerns appear to have trumped racial ones.

"Obama's personality - his speech, his look - he provides [white voters] with a non-threatening way to move forward on this issue, and that's a very positive development," said David Waymire, who led the unsuccessful opposition to the anti-affirmative action initiative. "He is not Kwame Kilpatrick," he said, referring to the Detroit mayor who resigned last month after pleading guilty in a sex and misconduct scandal.

For black observers of American politics in particular, Obama's ability to win over voters who harbor negative views of African-Americans at large is a complex, but hopeful, sign.

"I didn't think the election itself is necessarily going to transport a lot of people, but I've been changing my view on that a bit lately," said Walters. "I've been in personal circumstances where I said to myself, 'I wonder if this person sees me differently because a black person is about to be the president of the United States?'" ++


The Obama campaign has links to editorials backing him:
http://therecord.barackobama.com/?p=2908

Obama also yesterday gained the backing of two major weeklies: The New York Observer (NYC) and Willamette Week in Oregon.

Here is the latest chart of dailies. As always, we include in brackets who the paper went with in 2004 with B=Bush and K=Kerry.

BARACK OBAMA
64 newspapers total
Well over 8 million circulation (we are still counting)

ARKANSAS
Arkansas Times (K): 34,000

CALIFORNIA
The Argus (Fremont) (K): 26,749
Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek) (K): 183,086
Daily Review (Hayward) (K): 30,704
The Fresno Bee (K): 150,334
La Opinion (Los Angeles) (K): 114,892
Los Angeles Times (N/A): 773,884
The Modesto Bee (K): 78,001
The Monterey County Herald (K): 28,933
Oakland Tribune (K): 96,535
The (Stockton) Record (B): 57,486
The Sacramento Bee (K): 288,755
San Bernardino Sun (B): 54,315
San Francisco Chronicle (K): 370,345
San Jose Mercury News (K): 234,772
San Mateo County Times (K): 25,982
Santa Cruz Sentinel (K): 23,290
Tri-Valley Herald (B): 29,759

COLORADO
Cortez Journal (K): 6,700
The Denver Post (B)
The Durango Herald (K): 8,870
Gunnison Country Times (N/A): 4,000
Ouray County Plaindealer (K): 3,000

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
The Washington Post (K): 673,180

FLORIDA
Miami Herald (K):

GEORGIA
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (K)

HAWAII
Honolulu Star-Bulletin (K): 64,305

ILLINOIS
Chicago Tribune (B): 541,663
Chicago Sun-Times (K):
Southwest News-Herald (K)

IOWA
The Storm Lake Times (K): 3,200

MAINE
Bangor Daily News (K)
Brunswick Times-Record (K)

MASSACHUSETTS
The Boston Globe (K): 350,605
The Standard-Times (New Bedford) (K): 30,306

MICHIGAN
The Muskegon Chronicle (K): 41,114

MISSOURI
Kansas City Star
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (K): 255,057

NEW MEXICO
Las Cruces Sun-News (B)
Santa Fe New Mexican (K): 25,249

NEW YORK
el Dario La Prensa (): 53,856

NORTH CAROLINA
Asheville Citizen-Times (K): 50,160

OHIO
The (Toledo) Blade (K): 119,901
Dayton Daily News (K): 116,690
The (Canton) Repository (B): 65,789
Springfield News-Sun (K): 24,684

OREGON
Mail Tribune (Medford) (K): 30,349
The Oregonian of Portland (K)
Yamhill Valley News-Register

PENNSYLVANIA
The Express-Times (Easton) (B): 44,561
Philadelphia Inquirer (K):
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (K): 214,374

TENNESSEE
Chattanooga Times (K): 71,716
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis) (K): 146,961
The (Nashville) Tennessean (K): 161,131

TEXAS
The Lufkin Daily News (K): 12,225

UTAH
The Salt Lake Tribune (B):

VIRGINIA
Falls Church News-Press (K): 30,500

WASHINGTON
The Columbian (B): 44,623
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (K): 129,563
The Seattle Times (K): 220,883

WEST VIRGINIA
The Charleston Gazette (K): 48,061

WISCONSIN
The Capital Times (Madison) (K): 16,335
Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) (B): 87,930


JOHN McCAIN
18 newspapers total
About 1.7 million daily circulation

CALIFORNIA
Napa Valley Register: 16,283
The San Francisco Examiner (B): 80,000

COLORADO
Mountain Valley News (Cedaredge): 2,000
The Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction) (B): 31,349
The Pueblo Chieftain (B): 49,169

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
The Washington DC Examiner (N/A): 100,073

FLORIDA
Tampa Tribune

MARYLAND
The Baltimore Examiner (N/A): 50,000

MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Herald (B): 182,350
The (Lowell) Sun (B): 44,439

NEW HAMPSHIRE
Foster's Daily Democrat (B): 22,547
Union Leader (Manchester) (B): 51,782

NEW YORK
New York Post (B): 702,488

OHIO
The (Findlay) Courier (B): 22,319

TEXAS
Amarillo Globe-News (B): 44,764
Dallas Morning News (B):

WASHINGTON
(Spokane) Spokesman-Review (B): 89,779

WEST VIRGINIA
Wheeling News-Register (B): 12,821 ++


He Just Can't Quit W
FRANK RICH, NYT
October 18, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/opinion/19rich.html

OLD Mr. Straight Talk has become so shaky a speaker that when he does talk straight, it's startling. On Wednesday night, John McCain mustered exactly one such moment of clarity: "Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago."

Thanks largely to this line, McCain's remaining base in the political press graded his last debate performance his best. The public, not so much. As with the previous debates, every poll found Barack Obama the winner, this time by as much as two-to-one ratios. Obama even swept the focus group convened by the G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz in the once-impregnable McCain bunker of Fox News.

Perhaps voters were unimpressed by McCain's big moment because they can figure out the obvious rejoinder: Why didn't McCain run against President Bush four years ago - as he had four years before that? Instead McCain campaigned for Bush's re-election, cheered for Bush policies he once opposed and helped lower himself and America into the pit where we find ourselves today.

The day after the debate, McCain put up a new ad trying yet again to shake the president. "The last eight years haven't worked very well, have they?" he asks, as if he were an innocent bystander the entire time. But no matter what McCain says or does, he still can't quit the guy. Heading from a Midtown hotel to a fund-raiser the night before facing Obama onstage on Long Island last week, the McCain motorcade lined up right next to the New York red-carpet premiere of Oliver Stone's "W." A black cat would have been a better omen.

The election isn't over, but there remain only three discernible, if highly unlikely, paths to a McCain victory. A theoretically mammoth wave of racism, incessantly anticipated by the press, could materialize in voting booths on Nov. 4. Or newly registered young and black voters could fail to show up. Or McCain could at long last make good on his most persistent promise: follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and, once there, strangle him with his own bare hands on "Hannity & Colmes."

Even Republicans are rapidly bailing on a McCain resuscitation. It's a metaphor for the party's collapse that on the day of the final debate both Nancy Reagan and Dick Cheney checked into hospitals. Conservatives have already moved past denial to anger on the Kubler-Ross scale of grief. They are not waiting for votes to be counted before carrying out their first round of Stalinist purges. William F. Buckley's son Christopher was banished from National Review for endorsing Obama. Next thing you know, there will be a fatwa on that McCain-bashing lefty, George Will.

As the G.O.P.'s long night of the long knives begins, myths are already setting in among the right's storm troops and the punditocracy alike as to what went wrong. And chief among them are the twin curses of Bush and the "headwinds" of the economy. No Republican can win if the party's incumbent president is less popular than dirt, we keep being told, or if a looming Great Depression 2 is Issue No. 1.

This is an excuse, not an explanation. It absolves McCain of much of the blame and denies Obama much of the credit for their campaigns. It arouses pity for McCain when he deserves none. It rewrites history.

Bush's impact on the next Republican presidential candidate did not have to be so devastating. McCain isn't, as he and his defenders keep protesting, a passive martyr to a catastrophic administration. He could have made separating himself from Bush the brave, central and even conservative focus of his campaign. Far from doing that, he embraced the Bush ethos - if not the incredible shrinking man himself - more tightly than ever. The candidate who believes in "country first" decided to put himself first and sell out his principles. That ignoble decision is what accounts for both the McCain campaign's failures and its sleaze. It's a decision McCain made on his own and for which he has yet to assume responsibility.

Though it seems a distant memory now, McCain was a maverick once. He did defy Bush on serious matters including torture, climate change and the over-the-top tax cuts that bankrupted a government at war and led to the largest income inequality in America since the 1930s. But it isn't just his flip-flopping on some of these and other issues that turned him into a Bush acolyte. The full measure of McCain's betrayal of his own integrity cannot even be found in that Senate voting record - 90 percent in lockstep with the president - that Obama keeps throwing in his face.

The Bushian ethos that McCain embraced, as codified by Karl Rove, is larger than any particular vote or policy. Indeed, by definition that ethos is opposed to the entire idea of policy. The whole point of the Bush-Rove way of doing business is that principles, coherent governance and even ideology must always be sacrificed for political expediency, no matter the cost to the public good.

Like McCain now, Bush campaigned in 2000 as a practical problem-solver who could "work across the partisan divide," as he put it in his first debate with Al Gore. He had no strong views on any domestic or foreign issue, except taxes and education. Only after he entered the White House did we learn his sole passion: getting and keeping power. That imperative, not the country, would always come first.

One journalist who detected this modus operandi early was Ron Suskind, who, writing for Esquire in January 2003, induced John DiIulio, the disillusioned chief of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to tell all. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio said. "What you've got is everything - and I mean everything - being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

If politics strongarm everything, you end up with the rampant cronyism, nonexistent long-term planning and abrupt, partisan policy improvisations that fed the calamities of Iraq, Katrina and the economic meltdown. Incredibly, McCain has nakedly endorsed the Bush-Rove brand of governance in his own campaign by assembling his personal set of lobbyist cronies and Rove operatives to run it. They have not only entangled him in a welter of conflicts of interest, but they've furthered cynical political stunts like the elevation of Sarah Palin. At least Bush and Rove didn't try to put an unqualified hack like, say, Alberto Gonzales half a heartbeat away from the presidency.

As if the Palin pick weren't damning enough, McCain and his team responded to the financial panic by offering their own panicky simulation of the Bush style of crisis management in real time. Fire the S.E.C. chairman and replace him with Andrew Cuomo! Convene a 9/11 commission to save Wall Street! Don't bail out A.I.G.! Do bail out A.I.G.! Reacting to polls and the short-term dictates of 24-hour news cycles, McCain offered as many economic-policy reboots in a month as Bush offered "Plans for Victory" during the first three years of the Iraq war.

Now McCain is trying to distract us from his humiliating managerial ineptitude by cranking up the politics of fear - another trademark Bush-Rove strategy. But the McCain camp's quixotic effort to turn an "old washed-up terrorist" into a wedge issue as divisive as same-sex marriage is too little, too late and too tone-deaf at a time when Americans are suffering too much to indulge in 1960s culture wars. Voters want policies that might actually work rather than another pandering, cynical leader who operates mainly on the basis of his "gut" and political self-interest.

The former Bush speechwriter David Frum has facetiously written that McCain could be rescued by "a 5,000-point rise in the Dow and a 20 percent jump in home prices." But the economy, stupid, can't be blamed for McCain's own failures, any more than Bush can be. Even before the housing bubble burst and Wall Street tumbled, voters could see that the seething, impulsive nominee isn't temperamentally fit to be president.

That's where the debates have come in. There may have been none of those knockout blows the press craves, but the accretional effect has been to teach the public that McCain isn't steady enough to run the country even if the economy were sound, and that Obama just might be.

In Debate No. 1, you could put the volume on mute and see what has proved to be the lasting impressions of both candidates start to firm up. In Debate No. 2, McCain set the concrete: he re-enacted the troubling psychological cartography of his campaign "suspension" by wandering around the stage like a half-dotty uncle vainly trying to flee his caregiver. After the sneering and eye-rolling of McCain's "best" debate on Wednesday, CNN's poll found the ever-serene Obama swamping him on "likeability," 70 to 22 percent.

At least McCain had half a point on Wednesday night when he said, "I am not President Bush." What he has offered his country this year is an older, crankier, more unsteady version of Bush. Tragically, he can no sooner escape our despised president than he can escape himself. ++


ROLLING STONE: It's Already Stolen
Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today
http://www.gregpalast.com/rolling-stone-its-already-stolen/

Don't worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election.  According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.

Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging" ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters.  The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.

There's more:

- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls."

Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote.  For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.

The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.

"Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats."

The investigators level a deadly serious charge:

"If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."

Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone.

[Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via inter...@gregpalast.com.]

Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, www.StealBackYourVote.org

For updates and video reports, go to RollingStone.com, http://GregPalast.com and StealBackYourVote.org. ++


Obama campaign wants Attorneygate prosecutor to probe GOP's 'sham anti-fraud campaign'

Nick Juliano,Raw Story
Friday October 17, 2008
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Obama_campaign_wants_Attorneygate_prosecutor_to_1017.html

The current spate of trumped-up allegations of "voter fraud" coming from John McCain's campaign and his Republican allies and the FBI's decision to investigate represents exactly the same sort of politicization of justice that is at the root of an ongoing investigation into the firing of federal prosecutors, Barack Obama's campaign alleges.

Obama attorney Bob Bauer has asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to expand the authority of the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the US Attorney firings to also include the fraud allegations. The campaign released a seven-page letter (.pdf) Bauer wrote to Mukasey on Friday requesting the investigation.

"Now, on the emerging evidence of recent conduct undertaken by Bush Administration officials, Republican Party officials, and representatives of the McCain-Palin campaign," he wrote, "it appears that further misconduct of the same nature, directly relevant to the work of the Special Prosecutor, requires that the scope of the Special Prosecutor's assignment be expanded."

Bauer cites the case of former US Attorney David Iglesias, who represented the District of New Mexico until 2006. Bush administration officials reportedly conspired to sack Iglesias in part because of his unwillingness to bring specious voter-fraud charges before an election. Iglesias this week called the voter fraud investigations a scare tactic and said he was shocked to see the FBI was pursuing an investigation based on similarly unmerited accusations of fraud.

On a conference call with reporters Friday, Bauer slammed the "illicit involvement of senior law enforcement officials" in leaking the details of the so-called fraud investigation. The Obama lawyer noted that the leak came "literally within 24 hours" of McCain's statement at Wednesday night's debate that ACORN was threatening the "fabric of our democracy."

The McCain campaign has turned attacking ACORN into a central theme of its campaign in recent weeks, with vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin continuing the assault at a rally in Ohio on Friday.

The community organization, witch which Obama has previously been involved, has produced a relatively small number of inaccurate registration forms in connection with its drive to sign up a million new voters, but it has not been registering voters directly on Obama's behalf and there's no evidence that it's actions in this or any previous election cycle have led to widespread voter fraud.

Bauer said the "reckless and incendiary" attacks from the McCain campaign were aimed more at intimidating voters than at ferreting out fraud. ACORN primarily registered low-income and minority voters, and voting rights advocates fear those voters might not turn out on Election Day to avoid potential harassment at the polls.

The Supreme Court also delivered a setback to the GOP on Friday, ruling against Ohio Republicans who have been feuding with the Secretary of State over registration rules.

Bauer said the conduct he outlines is "directly relevant" to the special prosecutor's investigation and requested a meeting with Mukasey to discuss expanding the investigation.

"Once is more than enough," he wrote. "The Department has yet to recover its credibility after the calamitous politicization of its mission in this Administration and the documented misconduct ... that resulted from the corrupt injection of politics into federal law enforcement." ++


"So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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