DAVID? IT'S NOT AN ADDITIVE -- IT'S THE PRODUCT

Unlike, say, David Brooks, David Frum doesn't see much to admire Barack Obama. And yet, anticipating an Obama victory, he's concerned about the haters:

Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for the next president, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.

The problem is that Republicans looking at their own recent history are likely to conclude that "a mood of disdain and fury for the next president" would be quite useful -- after all, they declared Clinton the Antichrist and then won back Congress two years after he was elected; sustaining their fury, they investigated him until he slipped up, and that probably got them close enough in 2000 to steal the presidency from Clinton's VP, who otherwise should have sailed to victory on a wave of peace and prosperity.

In fact, if McCain loses, I think a lot of Republicans are going to say it was because he timidly steered clear of the gutter -- at this week's debate, for instance. I think Daniel Larison is right:

...they are going to adopt something like Vietnam revisionism in which they express certainty that their candidate could have won if he'd just been willing to do whatever was necessary.

Never mind the fact that McCain and Palin just concluded a joint interview on Fox with Sean Hannity that was all Ayers, ACORN, and "air-raiding villages." (McCain at one point paraphrased the last talking point as "bombing villages and killing innocent civilians" and Hannity actually corrected him -- "That quote is 'air-raiding villages and killing civilians.'" McCain dutifully accepted the hand-slap, parroting Hannity. Gotta get that line of the week out correctly, Senator!) And never mind the fact that Team McCain just released an interminable Ayers ad, while the Murdoch print press, also working hand in glove with the McCain campaign, has decided that ACORN merits front-page treatment.

Frum, of course, wants people to buy his how-we've-lost-our-way book about conservatism, but it's no bestseller, and that's no surprise. Right-wingers aren't going to try to do anything differently after this election if Obama wins; they're just going to keep slinging the same mud, wait for him to make mistakes and/or struggle with problems that can't be solved quickly, and then blame whatever's wrong on his evil terrorist-coddling, voter-fraud-countenancing, America-hating inner core, which they tried to warn us about, but which John McCain was too much of a wuss to denounce when it counted.

(Larison link via Instaputz.)

CULTURALLY SENSITIVE PRONUNCIATION: IT'S A BIG JOKE ONLY IF DEMOCRATS DO IT

Last night, National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez posted this reader e-mail:

Subject: Liberal elite moment

When Obama says Pock-i-stahn I have an uncontrollable urge to read the New Yorker and find some Chardonnay.

Fortunately I have an old copy of NR and a Coors Light to snap me back to reality.

Seriously though -- no one in flyover country says Pock-i-stahn. It's annoying.

It's true -- Obama says "Pock-i-stan" and McCain doesn't. But McCain says "Kos-o-vuh," which is seen in some circles as the politically correct pronunciation -- check it out in the video of last night's debate, at 59:38. And Obama also says "Tah-lee-ban" -- but so does McCain, at 1:10:28.

But I guess only Obama's pronunciations are elitist.

Oh, and Lopez's colleague Mark Steyn adds this:

Re Senator Obama's ostentatiously exotic pronunciation of Pakistan, one thing I like about Sarah Palin is the way she says "Eye-raq".

You know why I don't like the fact that Palin says "Eye-raq"? Because I'm Italian -- I'm not "Eye-talian," and I don't appreciate it when people say "Eye-talian." So screw you, Steyn, on behalf of the Iraqi people and my people.

(Via Think Progress.)

BROOKS: McCAIN'S A GREAT MAN, APART FROM THAT EXPOSING-US-TO-CANCER THING

The blogosphere is all over this already, but let me sum it up briefly: David Brooks appeared today at a gathering for The Atlantic and declared Sarah Palin a "fatal cancer to the Republican party," because she's a know-nothing who "scorn[s] ideas entirely."

Brooks also lavished praise on Barack Obama's intellect and "social perception." But here's the thing: Brooks praised John McCain as well, saying he and Obama are "the two best candidates we've had in a long time."

OK, I'm confused. Shouldn't one of the "best candidates we've had in a long time" be a candidate who didn't inflict a political "cancer" on us and offer to put that "cancer" a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Oh, sorry, I forgot -- according to Brooks, "the McCain on the campaign trail" isn't "the real McCain" -- which means, I guess, that the McCain who picked Palin is some sort of body double, not "the real McCain."

In fact, what Brooks said when he was last arguing that we're not seeing "the real McCain" on the campaign trail was that we know this McCain is fake because the campaign "has no central argument."

Er, David? Maybe "scorn[ing] ideas entirely" is the McCain/Palin campaign's "central argument."

EXCLUSIVE! JOHN McCAIN AD PREVIEW!

Through sources whose names I'm not at liberty to divulge, I can now share with you a preview of John McCain's next attack ad.

For a few minutes this morning I thought I'd been slipped something bogus -- it was being reported that the McCain campaign was dropping its Bill Ayers attacks -- but now I see (via Balloon Juice) that there's still Ayers talk in the pipeline from Team McCain. So I trust that this ad is legit.

(Sorry, so far I have only a script and storyboards.)


ANNOUNCER: William Ayers and the Weather Underground conducted a campaign of terrorist bombings back in the 1960s.



Barack Obama says he was eight years old at the time ...



...but can we really trust him?

What Barack Obama isn't telling you is that he's descended from a tribe of Kenyan trickster-shamans ...



... whose spells can alter the nature of time.



So was Barack Obama really eight years old in 1969?

Or was he ...



...a dangerous non-white shape-shifter who was more than one thousand years old? And who might have helped hallucinogen-swallowing hippies in their efforts to overthrow the U.S. government?

How much do we really know about ...



Barack Hussein Obama?



SEN. McCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

Wow! That's harsh. That might be a game-changer.

REPUBLICANS: LET'S DO EVEN MORE OF WHAT ISN'T WORKING!

John McCain is being criticized for calling Barack Obama "that one" and what's the reaction in GOP circles?

A Republican official emails, on background:

The most memorable line of the night belonged to John McCain. McCain pointed out that "That One" vote for the 05 energy bill. Look for Republicans to note in coming days that "That One" also voted for higher taxes at least 94 times; "That One" has associations with unrepentant terrorists, etc...

There's your GOP for you -- sure, Republicans want to win elections, but if they're losing, they'd just as soon stop searching for a winning strategy and just stick with what they find emotionally satisfying, which is, invariably, calling the Democrat the Antichrist as obnoxiously as possible.

Or maybe it's that they just can't get their minds around the notion that, in some years, calling the Democrat the Antichrist simply doesn't work -- that's unimaginable to them, even though they lived through 1992 and 1996 and 1998 and 2006. I think that helps explain the much-blogged-about post-debate freakout by National Review's Andy McCarthy:

...Now, as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left? Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars? Would you have guessed that he's pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites? Would you come away thinking, "Gee, he's proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN"?

Nope. McCain didn't want to go there....

Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn't; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he's qualified for public office....

Er, Sarah Palin has been hammering away at precisely this for days, and it hasn't changed the public's view of Obama one iota. But, hell, it feels good, right?

If McCain has a chance right now, it's by appearing to take a high road -- working the biography, sticking to the notion that he's the battle-scarred guy who's been in the arena and Obama isn't. I don't think it can work, and obviously I don't want it to, but it's still his best bit. Obama has proved this year that the most attention-grabbing approach isn't always what works -- he stayed calm through Hillary's Rosie the Riveter period, he stayed calm through McCain's wave of "celebrity" ads and then through the first few days of Palinmania, and here he is in the lead. McCain's people complain that a not-so-negative campaign didn't move the needle -- but maybe it would have eventually. People liked the noble-maverick brand, even if it was poppycock. But McCain and Steve Schmidt were too antsy and impatient to stick with it.

McCAIN'S BRAIN

Three McCain lines from tonight's debate that explain why no one will ever call Steve Schmidt "the Genius":

* Americans' workers are the best in the world. They're the fundamental aspect of America's economy.

McCain just can't get over having been embarrassed by the "fundamentals of the economy are strong" debacle, and he keeps wanting to say that what he really meant was that American workers are good. But it just doesn't work. Why doesn't Schmidt -- or someone -- explain this to McCain and get him to retire this line?

* You know, my hero is a guy named Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt used to say walk softly -- talk softly, but carry a big stick. Sen. Obama likes to talk loudly.

McCain, bafflingly, loves attacking Obama for having said he'd go after Al Qaeda across the Pakistan border. That's a good idea -- attacking Obama for actually wanting to get bin Laden? Not working either. And nobody buys the notion that saying you want to kill an enemy is the same as "telegraphing your punches."

* Now, long ago, I warned about Vladimir Putin. I said I looked into his eyes and saw three letters, a K, a G and a B.

Bloody hell, the KGB was disbanded thirteen years ago. It's ancient history for voters under the age of 35. And it doesn't strike fear if you're also telling people there isn't going to be another Cold War. Lovely line if you're an after-dinner speaker and your audience is middle-aged or older, but creaky-sounding if you're running for president in the 21st century.

****

Another reason Schmidt is not a genius: McCain is good at town halls where he can compensate for his own seeming lack of vigor by feeding on the energy of the crowd -- but if there's no crowd reaction allowed, there's no energy. McCain couldn't compensate, and nobody in his campaign seems to have anticipated that he needed to.

(And holy crap -- the CNN snap poll not only says Obama won handily, it says he was regarded as the stronger leader, 54%-43%. I think that's a factor of McCain's physical bearing as much as what the two of them said.)

And beyond that, why devote the days leading up to your debate to All Ayers, All the Time when it's easy to anticipate that town hall questioners aren't going to ask you questions about that -- and when you also know that pivoting to those character attacks is going to make you look nasty and Lazio-like? Why make your entire message for days "My opponent is really, really scary" when you know the whole country is going to see him debate and see that he clearly isn't scary?

Not a great night for McCain. Rove would be doing a better job right now.

"THAT REQUIRES A COOL HAND AT THE TILLER"

Er, John? You're standing next to the coolest hand in American politics. And you are, to say the least, no competition on that score.

YOU KNOW WHY McCAIN LOOKS A BIT DESPERATE?

He's used to getting laughs (or other kinds of reactions) at his town halls. Under the rules of this one, the audience has to be silent. McCain's a wannabe stand-up comic, and he's thrown off when he can't get a reaction out of the crowd. It was up to him to adjust to the rules, but I don't think he has.

ON McCAIN AND TOWN HALLS

Kevin at Rumproast:

Isn't the prevailing notion that McCain's great during town halls a bit of a myth, eagerly propagated by Our Stupid Media, as well? Sure the McCain of several years ago may have shined during them, but his town halls that I've seen during this election season aren't all that. He has looked stiff, awkward, humorless and unconcerned.

I question the conventional wisdom for a different reason: in the McCain town halls we're all talking about, he's had no opponent. Sure, he may have taken a challenging question or two, but he was the only big dog in the room. It's going to be different with Obama there -- McCain may still have the advantage, but it's not going to be the same kind of event he did in the first part of the campaign.

It makes a difference to have a real opponent -- as I said before the first debate in the comments to this post, we couldn't that assume Obama would be all nuance versus McCain based on his Democratic primary debates, for the obvious reason that McCain, unlike Obama's Democratic opponents, actually has serious policy differences with him. And that turned out to be true -- Obama was much less nuanced and much sharper. So don't assume this is just a McCain town hall and an Obama town hall -- it's a contest. That matters.

PALIN AND MADONNA: THE LEAST SEXY SEX SYMBOLS EVER?

Over the weekend, my wife and I went to a diner where we've eaten often enough to be familiar to the proprietor. This time, as we were leaving, he began asking us if we'd watched the vice presidential debate. When we told him we had -- I should note that we've never told him anything about our political beliefs -- he said, "You know, I don't know anything about her politics, but that Sarah Palin, she's ... hot. More than McCain's wife. More than Mrs. Obama -- she's a little scary. Sarah Palin? She's very good looking. She's ... approachable."

I really don't get this.

I don't think I would get it if I agreed with Sarah Palin's politics. I know Palin inspires a lot of male lust (go here, if you dare, to read a drooling Palin article by George Gurley, the right-wing New York Observer columnist who elicited Ann Coulter's notorious quote about Timothy McVeigh and the New York Times building), but I can't even imagine feeling anything of the sort when I see her.

Even Palin critics seem to take it as a given that she's a knockout -- I don't know of anyone who's questioned that. However, I did read something yesterday that captured how I feel about Palin -- but it wasn't written about Palin; it was written about Madonna. It was this paragraph in a New York Times review by Jon Pareles of the current Madonna tour:

Has there ever been a colder pop sex symbol? For all the invitations in her lyrics, Madonna has always projected more calculation and industriousness than affection. She works; her audience looks and pays, becoming another conquest.

Pareles isn't the first person to say something like this about Madonna. Back in 1990, Luc Sante wrote a think piece about her for The New Republic -- yes, kids, back in the Reagan-Bush era people actually wrote think pieces about Madonna -- that said this:

...If truth be told, Madonna herself does not precisely exude sexuality. What she exudes is more like will, iron self-discipline, and, of course, punctuality, that courtesy of monarchs. In her "Ciao, Italia" video, decked out in various gymnastic outfits and body-pumping to the screams of tens of thousands in a soccer stadium in Turin, Madonna looks perfectly able to make the trains run on time.

...The reason that Madonna does not possess much intrinsic sexual appeal ... is that she lacks any trace of vulnerability, a quality that, it should be noted, is essential to the charms of both sexes. Pout and pant and writhe though she might, Madonna is not sexually convincing because her eyes do not register. They are too busy watching the door....

I feel I've seen Madonna be vulnerable, or at least briefly unguarded, once or twice over the years -- but, for all her sloppy syntax and phony gee-whizziness, Palin never seems that way. There were a couple of times, years ago, when I saw Madonna be unguarded while wrapping an interviewer around her finger -- I felt I saw a fleeting look in her eyes that said, I'm having fun doing this. For a moment she seemed like a human being, not an entertainment/provocation machine. I wouldn't use the word "approachable," but I think she was conveying something vaguely like what the diner proprietor thinks he saw (and I think he didn't see) in Palin.

I've described some of Palin's nasty talk on the stump as "gleeful," but I think that was the wrong word. Her smile of satisfaction when an attack draws applause seems to be saying, Good, that worked. I'm that much closer to ruling the world. That's the message I get from most of what Madonna does, but, as I say, on rare occasions she actually seems to be enjoying herself. Palin just seems pleased with herself -- it's different. It's a cold, cold feeling, and I don't see anything attractive or sexy about it.

WORRYING ABOUT DRAPE-MEASURING AGAIN

Even I've begun to think this thing's going quite well for Obama, but we really mustn't assume the race is effectively over:

Diageo/Hotline Tracking Poll: The Early Line

Obama-Biden 46%
McCain-Palin 44%
Undecided 9%

-- The race has tightened in the last day. After trailing by 5-7 pts. for the last 10 days, McCain is now just 2 pts. behind Obama.

--One potential reason: Obama's one-time lead on the question of who'd best handle the economy has evaporated. Today, Obama and McCain are tied at 42%. Independent voters favor McCain on the economy by an 8 pt. margin (42-34%)....

Is this poll just an outlier? Most other polls right now are very, very good news for Obama -- though the new CBS/New York Times poll also shows a tightening race, again with some slippage on economics:

Obama has lost some ground when it comes to perceptions of how he would handle the economy, though he still leads McCain when it comes to the issue.

Twenty-four percent of registered voters are "very confident" that the Democratic nominee would make the right decisions on the economy, down five points from before the presidential debate. Forty-one percent are not confident, up from 34 percent.

The press and the blogosphere are paying a lot of attention to the ugly tactics of the Republicans, particularly the work Palin has done to stir up anger among what Jesse Taylor calls her "Moostapo," but it's tax-and-spend tale-spinning, however debunkable, that probably puts Obama most at risk:

"The phoniest claim in a campaign that's been full of them is that Barack Obama is going to cut your taxes,'' said Palin, citing the voting record of the "Chicago politician.'' Obama is "committed now to nearly a trillion dollars more in new government spending, except he never bothers to explain where he's going to get the money for that... To get the money, he's going to have to raise taxes.''

Actually, Obama has said how he might pay for his initiatives - with higher taxes on wealthier Americans, those making more than $250,000, while cutting taxes for the middle class and lower-income, along with a windfall profits tax on oil companies. He also has said he might have to "phase in'' some of this, depending on the condition of the economy after inauguration.

"You can do the math or go with your gut... Either way, you come to the same conclusion,'' Palin said. " Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes.... "

When Republicans say, "The Democrats will raise your taxes," they don't need any more evidence than a bigot needs before saying, "Blacks are lazy," or "Jews are stingy." It's not exactly bigotry-based folklore, but it works essentially the same way -- how do we know it's true? Are you kidding? Everybody knows it's true!

****

OR PERHAPS IT'S NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT: Gallup Daily: 9-Point Obama Lead Ties Campaign High.

****

And regarding the "Moostapo," Adam Serwer at Tapped (whom you may remember as dnA) is absolutely right:

The question is not what will happen to Obama. Obama is well protected and will be fine. The question is what will happen to black folks lining up at the polls alongside the very people who have been told with the authority of one of America's major political parties, that the black man running for president is associated with "terrorists." What will happen when one of these people, ginned up with rage and a particular nationalistic fervor, decide to take out their anger on a real person?

****

MORE EVIDENCE THAT CBS AND HOTLINE ARE OUTLIERS? Obama is pulling away in the Battleground poll -- he's up by 7 (PDF). This was much tighter than other polls last week.

PLUTOCRATS ARE HURTING, TOO

At a congressional hearing yesterday, Congressman Henry Waxman held up a chart indicating that the chairman of the now-cratered Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, has made $480 million since 2000. That's a hell of a lot of money -- but Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times says the amount is not quite accurate:

Mr. Fuld of Lehman may theoretically have been awarded $480 million at the time of his payouts -- he called that figure inaccurate on Monday -- but he didn't get much money out. Indeed, Mr. Fuld was such a believer, he didn't sell a share of stock after the summer of 2007, riding Lehman's price tag all the way down; right after the company filed for bankruptcy protection, he cashed in stock for less than $500,000. (Those shares were worth $247 million last year.) "The majority of my compensation came in stock," he said at the hearing. "The vast majority of the stock that I got I still owned at the point of our filing."

Oh dear -- we may have vastly overestimated Fuld's good fortune.

So let's see: when Fuld cashed his stock shares in, they were worth $246,500,000 less than they had been. So he didn't make $480 million. Does that mean we need to subtract $246,500,000 from $480 million?

And would that suggest that he's made only $233,500,000 since 2000?

Poor guy!

In fact, that's not quite accurate either -- the Times says elsewhere that Fuld has made $256,411,839 since 2003. Only $256 million! That's so much less than $480 million you want to take up a collection for the guy.

I HAD NO IDEA ...

... that fifth-columnist liberals cheer and our national patriotic essence is sapped every time someone in America plays "Pomp and Circumstance."

Y'KNOW, THAT JOE McCARTHY HAD SOME GOOD IDEAS

Think the Palin/McCain campaign has been practicing McCarthyism lately? Apparently, according to old-school right-wing blogger Orrin Judd, the campaign isn't practicing enough McCarthyism. Judd thinks McCain should do an obvious imitation of McCarthy tonight -- as a debate tactic.

Judd cites an online petition in support of Bill Ayers, signed by a few hundred educators and others. Then he says:

There's your debate moment: Senator Obama, I hold in my hand a list of names [may as well give them the full McCarthy] of American educators who call upon us to forget about Bill Ayers "passionate participation" in "movements" and his refusal to disavow his personal terrorist campaign....

So, I wonder if you could clarify your position here: Should we just forget about Mr. Ayers's terrorist bombings, even though his only regret about them is that he didn't do enough or are these educators somewhat out of touch with American values, which require repentance before forgiveness?

Am I reading this wrong? Is Judd joking? I don't think he's joking. And just to clarify: That "[may as well give them the full McCarthy]"? That's Judd's line -- I didn't add that.

This is really the desk-jockey equivalent of the bloodlust currently manifesting itself at McCain and Palin rallies, where attendees shout "Terrorist!" in reference to Obama and "Kill him!" in reference to Ayers (or Obama?). Judd's fantasy, and the fantasy of a lot of other right-wingers, isn't that McCain will persuade voters that Obama is the lesser choice -- it's that he (and his running mate) will hold a show trial in which Obama is shown to be a person unfit to live among civilized people, and thus drive Obama from public life. It's political eliminationism.

A HOCKEY SKATE IN THE FACE FOREVER

Sure John McCain's attack ads are great on TV or on your computer, but don't you really want to experience them live?

No?

Me either. But that's what the Sarah Palin stump speech has turned into, apparently -- the concert version of the last couple of months of McCain's campaign. Watch the first half of this clip from a Palin appearance in Florida today -- after about a minute on Bill Ayers, she segues into a medley of Steve Schmidt's greatest attack-ad hits. They're way better than the studio versions!



Is this what America wants hear right now? Is this what swing voters want to hear right now? Compared to this, the campaigns of George W. Bush were masterpieces of uplift.

And then in the second half of the clip, after a brief invocation of Ronald Reagan (another shout-out to the base, which you'd think would be long since locked down by now), we get this:

You know, from now until Election Day, hang on to your hats, because, you know, it may get kinda rough here in terms of campaigns having to step up and kinda take the gloves off and start tellin' the truth about what a candidate stands for.

So I guess it's going to get even worse.

Is there a plan here? Some set of policies to get us through the next four years? As far as I can see, it's just wall-to-wall red meat, a partisan pep rally with little content and zero outreach, delivered by a person the public just can't take seriously in a way that confirms everyone's impression that she has an emotional age of fourteen.

Maybe I'm wrong and it's going to work, but it seems to me we've never seen Palin speak for more than three minutes without taking a swat at someone (and enjoying it way too much). That's not how you sell your ticket as presidential. Even candidates running the nastiest possible campaign go positive at great length once in a while (see: Poppy Bush's convention speech in '88), but we still have never seen Palin do it. And she's the face of this campaign.

(Via Hot Air.)

EVEN IF THE SMEARS ARE LIKELY TO FAIL, SHOULD OBAMA LET THEM SLIDE?

Sarah Palin and her running mate, John McCain, have gone to the nuclear option -- repeatedly playing the Ayers card and using Bill Kristol's column in The New York Times to bring up Jeremiah Wright again. The smart people say it isn't going to work. Howard Wolfson:

...Americans have lost a combined 1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks alone. Just as President Bush's failures in Iraq undermined his party's historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets.

... This is a big election about big issues. McCain's smallball will not work. This race will not be decided by lipsticked pigs....

Ezra Klein:

...And this assault probably will fail, and it probably will be defeated. Because the Obama campaign has figured out something pretty basic about it: Though the attacks work to touch something very deep and very real and a little bit scary in the American psyche, they're fundamentally pretty stupid. Stupider, I'd guess, than the voters, who may find a campaign based on reference to aging radicals and Columbia professors and crimes from the 1960s a bit esoteric amidst a financial crisis.

That's plausible, I guess -- in 1992, also a year of financial anxiety, Bill Clinton won on "the economy, stupid" despite facing a similar blizzard of attacks.

Unfortunately, those clouds over Clinton never went away. Clinton won, but the Clinton-haters got stronger. Before long, there was hardly anything left of the Republican Party but people who thought Clinton was the Antichrist. The self-sustaining strength of that hatred gave us a radical Republican Congress two years later, and a radical Republican president six years after that.

I think an Obama victory could be accompanied by a similar strengthening of Obama-as-Antichrist forces. Yes, the polls look terrific for Obama now, but so do the crowds for Palin.

So I find myself wanting Obama to make a statement about Bill Ayers somewhat in the style of his Reverend Wright speech -- not because I'm afraid he needs to do so to win (his campaign has been doing well by continually changing the subject back to McCain/Bushism), but because, if he really is going to be the next president, I'd like him to get to the White House with as few people as possible thinking that he got away with something and the evil forces now rule the land.

Of course, there's a lot of nonsense spewed about Obama, and it's possible Palin will allude to all of it before Election Day -- the Muslim rumors, the rumors about failing to pledge allegiance to the flag, and so on. I'm not saying Obama should make a speech about every last rumor. But the Ayers story is noxious even if it doesn't cost him a lot of votes, and I wish he'd bury it once and for all.

PALIN: IN THE GREAT TRADITION OF GOP NARCISSISTS

Here's Sarah Palin, explaining in her Wasilla City Council years that no moral or ethical consideration applies to her if it conflicts with her needs, as described by Noam Scheiber of The New Republic:

The city had traditionally put up part of the purse for the Iron Dog competition--the grueling, 2,000-mile snow machine race that usually starts in Wasilla--and one year the council considered upping its ante. (First prize could be tens of thousands of dollars.) When a colleague pointed out that Palin should recuse herself because her husband was a perennial Iron Dog contender, she protested, "I don't think I have a conflict of interest here because Todd won it last year. There's no guarantee that he's going to win it this year." As others chimed in to explain the problem, Palin dug in her heels. "Well, it could be perceived that way, but it isn't," she harrumphed.

And here's George W. Bush, explaining early in his presidency that the judgment of experts doesn't apply to him if it conflicts with his preferences, as described by Ron Suskind of Esquire:

One morning in 2001, one of President Bush's most senior economic advisors walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. The day before, the advisor had learned that the president had decided to send out tax-rebate checks to stimulate the faltering economy....

... the man ... began to explain his problem with the president's decision.... this advisor was one of the experts... He was convinced, he told Bush, that the president's position would soon enough be seen as "bad policy."

This, it seems, was the wrong thing to say to the president.

According to senior administration officials who learned of the encounter soon after it happened, President Bush looked at the man. "I don't ever want to hear you use those words in my presence again," he said.

"What words, Mr. President?"

"Bad policy," President Bush said. "If I decide to do it, by definition it's good policy. I thought you got that."

And we can take this all the way back to Richard Nixon's famous words:

Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.

****

Scheiber's article portrays a Palin who didn't come from money and deeply resents anyone who has means or was able to get an education at a top-tier school. He also portrays Wasilla as a town where a lot of Southern, Christian-right oil workers settled, bringing their cultural views with them; Palin became their candidate.

This makes her, in a way, both a Nixon and a Bush.

Scheiber's article is an important assessment of someone who's likely to remain a national figure, either as vice president or as the leader of an anti-Obama bitter-resentment shadow government. But I think Scheiber underplays the Palin narcissism. It's narcissism interwoven with insecurity -- just like Nixon's (his insecurity was class-based) and W's (his is intellectual and familial). It's a scary trait, one we really need to keep as far away from the White House as possible.

(Suskind link via Steve Benen.)

****

UPDATE: Yes, I know how to spell "narcissists."

OH, THAT CAREFULLY CRAFTED SPONTANEITY

CNN:

Sarah Palin is holding a campaign rally in Clearwater, Florida this hour, during which she expected to continue her attacks against Barack Obama's connection to Bill Ayers.

"Turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers. And according to The New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol,'" She will say according to excerpts released by the campaign. "Wow. And there’s even more to the story...."

Palin's prepared remarks include the word "Wow"? That's in the scripted text of her speech?

Wouldn't it be a hoot if all this down-to-earthiness turned out to be the work of a bunch of preppie-lockjaw Buckley-wannabe kids from the Ivy League? "Oh, Biff, I don't think there should be a 'You betcha' here because you've got a 'Gee whiz' and two 'Gosh darn its' right above it." "Yes, Binky, you're so right. Should we make another pitcher of bloodies?"

PALIN BITTERNESS WATCH

I don't want to spend much time thinking about Sarah Palin's tweak of a Madeleine Albright quote found on a Starbucks cup (Albright said, "There's a place in hell reserved for women who don't help other women" and Palin rendered it as "There's a place in hell reserved for women who don't support other women") -- but Palin apparently got a great response to the line at a California rally ... and then reacted with Nixonian bitterness:

As the audience cheered, she remarked: "Okay, now, thank you so much for receiving that well. I didn't know how that was gonna go over. And now, California, let's see what a comment like I just made, how that is turned into whatever it'll be turned into tomorrow with the newspaper."

Can this woman ever stop talking about the grudges she's nursing?

(Admittedly, the press is calling her on the rewrite -- but, like her running mate, Palin's saying so many nasty things about the press that she's practically begging for criticism from journalists. The question is, why bring this up in a speech? Why should the public care? AP and Katie Couric aren't on the ballot.)

****

A couple of other thoughts about this:

Isn't that a rather harsh message -- "Vote for me or suffer eternal damnation in a lake of fire"?

And Sarah Palin drinks Starbucks? Still? In this economy? Isn't that, um, elitist?

TAILGUNNER GIDGET ISN'T BEING RACIST -- SO FAR

It's quite possible that sooner or later Sarah Palin will toss out a coded racist Obama attack or two, but I don't see how her Ayers smear qualifies, as Douglass Daniel of AP alleges:

... Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American....

Nahhh. Here's what she said, at least the first time, in her own inimitable syntax:

"This is not a man who sees America as you see it, and how I see America," Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said in Colorado, according to a pool report. "We see America as the greatest force for good in this world. If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for all of us.

"Our opponent though, is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

That's an attack on scary weird sandal-wearing hippie college professor radical bomb-throwing ... well, you get the picture. It's bizarre: Here's a woman who was four years old in 1968 trying to hang sixties radicalism around the neck of a guy who was seven in 1968. But, of course, when movement conservatives talk about Democrats and liberals, it's always 1968 -- right now.

I'm reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. It's clear from Nixonland that what unsettled a lot of middle-class, straight-arrow whites forty years ago was a combination of inner-city and campus unrest. But the principal bogeyman for contemporary GOP culture warriors is the white 1960s college radical, along with that radical's contemporary successors (defined as anybody with politics that are even remotely progressive). This is presumably because most culture warriors resented the fact that lefties were considered cooler on campus when they were in college.

*****

I don't know what to make of these attacks. The worrywart in me wants to scream, Barack, do something! Answer the charges! Give a speech about Ayers! But I've learned over the past few weeks that Obama and his people are smarter than I am -- they didn't go after Sarah Palin, they kept the focus on John McCain, they ran the campaign they intended to run, and, judging from the polls, it's working. So I'm just going to trust that they know what they're doing

*****

Meanwhile, Tailgunner Gidget took a few moments out of an appearance in Omaha this evening to do what she does best -- nurse grievances. Here's some liveblogging from the Omaha World-Herald:

7:46 p.m.: Palin took a swipe at the mainstream media for not questioning Obama about his plan to cut taxes.

She also described a "less than successful interview" with "someone in the mainstream media," to a chorus of audience boos.

She then said she wanted to give Tina Fey "more material."

"Job security for Saturday Night Live," she said, referencing the former SNL writer and Emmy-winning star.

She referenced the Katie Couric question: "What do you read?"

When Palin said she was reading yesterday's New York Times, the people shouted "Boo!"

What was Obama saying a few months ago about "bitter" people? I think we just found one.

PALIN: MEET THE NEW PARTY BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD PARTY BOSS

I think Frank Rich is really on target in today's New York Times -- he argues that Sarah Palin is primarily looking out for her own future, which, she very much believes, includes the presidency, either (literally) over John McCain's dead body or in a future election year (and she's joined in this belief by a lot of Republicans):

...there's a steady unnerving undertone to Palin's utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.

My one quibble with Rich concerns this:

We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: "Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!"

... Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska's self-styled embodiment of Joe Sixpack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter.

But it's not either/or. Palin is a fighter, but she's also a huge whiner -- just about all she's done since the debate (apart from accusing Barack Obama of being a big commie) is whine about the mean old mainstream media "filter" that's allegedly prevented her from saying exactly what she wants to say to the American people, with exactly the amount of editing, or lack of editing, that she wants.

So she's a pugnacious whiner -- and that's classic GOP. That's an archetype that goes back at least to Richard Nixon.

I don't know how Republicans have pulled this off over the years, but they've managed to make people believe they're the tough ones even as they whinge about hippies and college professors and liberal journalists and overwweight documentary filmmakers who are being mean to them. It's baffling. Palin is doing it again, to the delight of the base.

I don't know if she can ride this all the way to the White House. I certainly hope not. But if she gets there, it won't be as a person who rolls with the punches. It'll be as someone who doesn't, and lets everyone know that, as aggressively as possible.

ACCENTUATE THE NEGATIVE

I haven't had a chance to watch Sarah Palin's full interview with Carl Cameron of Fox News, but I've read the transcript -- and I'm puzzled.

Maybe Palin's debate performance didn't change the course of the election, but just about everyone in America thinks she exceeded expectations, and some focus-group undecideds thought she won the debate. So you'd think she'd be trying to capitalize on whatever goodwill she built up to expand McCain's voter base.

But in the Fox interview she seems to be doing the opposite. Virtually the entire thing is a "So there!" directed at everyone she believes has mistreated her recently, or doubted her or questioned her judgment. Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric asked tough follow-up questions? Denounce the mainstream media! Her inability to name newspapers she reads and Supreme Court cases she disagrees with was mocked? Palin says, I've got your lists right here, haters! The press pointed out some debate gaffes? Rehash every one of them and explain why they really weren't gaffes at all!

Obviously, this interview wasn't journalism -- Fox News was working hand in glove with Palin to present her precisely as she wanted to be presented. So why is this how she wanted to be presented? Why not something a little more positive in order to appeal to swing voters?

I think it's because Palin and the McCainites are so immersed in the culture of right-wing resentment that they think this is the way you appeal to swing voters. I think they believe the vast majority of Americans utterly despise Katie Couric and rank "the liberal media" among the nation's biggest villains. At a time of endless war and financial meltdown, that's absurd, if that really is what they're thinking.

Either that or this is all about the future if there's an Obama victory. Maybe, in anticipation of 2012, Palin is looking out for #1 by positioning herself as the embodiment of right-wing culture-war resentment. (If so, she's reenacting Dan Quayle's career at warp speed -- his Murphy Brown speech came years after his initial humiliations on the national stage.) Or maybe Fox is positioning Palin and itself as the right-wing shadow president and her press office in exile.

Whatever's going on, there's still a month to go before election day, and there are still a lot of swing voters John McCain could theoretically win over. But his campaign either doesn't know how to win them over -- or doesn't care.

THE MITT THAT GOT AWAY

Taegan Goddard, while acknowledging that Sarah Palin probably helped John McCain a bit Thursday night, still wonders what might have been:

Imagine if Sen. John McCain had chosen Mitt Romney as his running mate instead. While Romney would not likely have excited the Republican base as much as Palin did, he would be seen as a more steady hand with the nation's financial markets in crisis. And it's unlikely that McCain would be pulling out of Michigan if native son Romney was on the ticket.

Goddard is right about Michigan -- but I think he's forgetting what a nutjob Romney has become.

Remember Romney's bizarre Republican convention speech last month, in which he argued that the status quo in Washington is too liberal?

Is Washington now, liberal or conservative? Let me ask you some questions.

Is a Supreme Court decision liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with constitutional rights? It's liberal.

Is a government liberal or conservative that puts the interests of the teachers union ahead of the needs of our children? It's liberal.

Is a Congress liberal or conservative that stops nuclear power plants and off-shore drilling, making us more and more dependent on Middle Eastern tyrants? It's liberal.

Is government spending, putting aside inflation, liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? It's liberal.

We need change all right: change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.

And remember the speech he gave to the Conservative Political Action Committee back in February, which seemed as if it must have sounded better in the original German?

The threat to our culture comes from within. The 1960's welfare programs created a culture of poverty. Some think we won that battle when we reformed welfare, but the liberals haven't given up. At every turn, they try to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility. They fight to strip work requirements from welfare, to put more people on Medicaid, and to remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drug -- we have got to fight it like the poison it is!

That CPAC speech took place around the time Romney was meeting with Ralph Reed, Paul Weyrich, Bay Buchanan, Laura Ingraham and other far-rightists "to discuss the former Massachusetts governor becoming the face of conservatism."

Goaded on by Steve Schmidt, Romney probably would have been even more of a culture warrior than Palin is now.

Add that to the fact that he would never have attracted the huge wave of new volunteers to the McCain campaign that Palin attracted, and the fact that Romney and McCain together would have been a ticket that owned twelve houses worth about $35 million, and the fact that many of the same evangelicals who've long mistrusted McCain believe Mormonism is a cult, and the fact that a Romney pick never would have stolen the headlines from Barack Obama's convention speech, and it's obvious that picking Mitt would have done McCain no good.

Damn -- what a missed opportunity for us.

VERBAGE, NUCULAR ...

... and, about 32 seconds into this clip, "henious":



Er, Sarah? The i comes before the n.

(Via TPM.)

PALIN: AN INTERVIEW IS FAIR ONLY IF YOU ASK QUESTIONS I LIKE

Will this woman ever stop whining?

Sarah Palin woke up this morning and gave an interview to (surprise!) Fox News. Raw Story has an excerpt (see the non-YouTube video at the link, which I can't seem to embed) -- and if you think Palin is taking a gracious victory lap in response to all the praise she's been receiving from fellow right-wingers, well, forget it. She's still bitching and moaning about how the evil media (Katie Couric in particular) treated her before the debate:

Well, OK, I'll tell ya honestly. The Sarah Palin in those interviews is a little bit annoyed. Because it's like, man, no matter what you say, you're going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you're going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go on to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that, too.

In other words: It's unfair for anyone to ask tough follow-up questions or criticize my answers, even if (or especially if) those answers are evasive. No matter what I say in an interview, everyone should just like me and applaud me and put a gold star on my forehead. And if I'm evasive, it's because the question I decided to answer was the one I should have been asked.

(Yes, I know -- That's pretty much what she said last night.)

Wait, it gets worse:

But in those Katie Couric interviews, I did feel that there were a lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, or what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which will lead to killing jobs. I wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars. Some of his comments that he's made about the war that I think made -- in my world, disqualify someone from consideration as the next commander in chief, some of the comments that he's made about Afghanistan, what we're doing there, supposedly just air-raiding villages and killing civilians? That's reckless, and I wanted to talk about things like that. I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that's also an indication of being outside of that Washington elite, outside of the media elite also, and just wanted to talk to Americans without the filter and let 'em know what we stand for.

Apart from her distortions of the facts, and the scurrilous thing she says about Obama as commander in chief, you know what? Palin has every opportunity to talk about these things. She can say all this in her campaign rallies. She can buy TV time and say it in an ad. She can go nuts -- it's a free country.

But the rest of us don't have a moral obligation to stand aside and let her dictate every question she's asked, then dictate everyone's reaction to her answers.

PALIN DEBATE FLOW CHART

Someone's probably already e-mailed this to you, but if not ...



Perfect.

SARAH PALIN, HAPPY BUNNY

David Brooks:

On matters of substance, [Palin's] main accomplishment was to completely sever ties to the Bush administration.

Palin, in the debate:

PALIN: Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future.

It takes a special kind of person to hear that and then write a sentence about it that begins, "On matters of substance."

*****

More Brooks:

With a bemused smile and a never-ending flow of words, she laid out her place on the ticket -- as the fearless neighbor for the heartland bemused by the idiocies of Washington. Her perpetual smile served as foil to Biden's senatorial seriousness.

Where was this woman was during her interview with Katie Couric?

Where was she? Trapped -- stuck with no one to address her remarks to except her interviewer, who, like Charlie Gibson a few days earlier, was giving her a look that said, "I see through all your bullshit."

*****

And then there's Peggy Noonan, who's also besotted again:

As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there.

Noonan thinks this a good thing. It's not a good thing, and it points up the other huge problem with Palin, beyond her Bushite policy positions and her utter lack of qualifications for the job -- her unbridled narcissism.

Politicians tend to be narcissistic, obviously, but I think Palin's self-obsession is the purest I've ever seen. Bill Clinton, for instance, can radiate narcissism, as can, say, Joe Biden (though not last night), but when Clinton and Biden are self-regarding, it's because they think they're masters of the task at hand -- politics or statecraft. Palin's self-regard is most nakedly obvious when she's landed a zinger. The insufferably smug look she gets on her face makes clear that all she cares about is Sarah Palin winning. The reason she can't master the policy proposals, or even describe them in any detail, is that her ego isn't invested in doing anything except advancing the cause of herself.

Marilyne Blackburn, who competed against Palin in the Miss Alaska pageant, explained it concisely to a New Republic reporter recently:

"I promise you, look in her eyes when she speaks," said Blackburn, who beat Palin for the Miss Alaska crown. "That tough look in her eye [says], 'You're just not going to get me. I am going to make this happen."

Make what happen? Not a specific set of governing choices or policy proposals. No: make Sarah Palin's success happen.



****

By the way, Noonan liked the winking, and she and Brooks also liked Palin's ridiculous attempt at a psych-out when she shook hands with Biden ("Hey, can I call you Joe?"). Never mind the fact that, apart from one "Say it ain't so, Joe," Palin never actually called Biden "Joe," and there wasn't the slightest evidence that this had any effect on Biden. What mattered is that it had an effect on right-wingers, especially right-wing pundits. What a spunky gal!

I worry about the possibility that right-wing pundits, all writing from the same script, will change the story of this debate from "Palin Doesn't Fail" to "Palin Triumphs." I share Kos's enthusiuasm for polls as a counterweight:

I LOVE those CNN and CBS insta-polls. Rather than sit and spin bullshit all night, the pundits actually have to adjust to what the public actually thought.

In this case, it's great for us since the public thought both Obama and Biden won overwhelmingly. But regardless, it slams the door shut on elite pundits pretending to speak for the American people. Now, the American people can speak for themselves, and the pundits have to react accordingly.

I hope that's how it works. In any case, I have trouble with people who sneer at polls -- yes, there are bad polls, but polls in general are the only way the Beltway ever learns that the public isn't buying what the Beltway is selling. If it hadn't been for polls, the Beltway would have gone on telling us that the GOP really outflanked Democrats on Terri Schiavo. If it hadn't been for polls, the Beltway might have just gone on telling us that George W. Bush is a popular president -- and I mean still, to this day.

WELL, THAT'S OVER

Maybe not by much, but I fear that the world-weary gray eminence lost to the slogan-spewing mean girl.

*****

...Though Soledad O'Brien was just on CNN saying that the focus-group people were "dialing way down" in response to the folksy crap. And the focus group did seem to lean a bit in Obama and Biden's direction.

*****

Yowza -- Palin went straight from the debate to a rally. Forget whether McCain has health problems -- is Palin clinically manic?

*****

Forget what I said above -- a CNN snap poll says Biden was the winner, 51%-36%, and on the question of whether Palin is qualified to be president, she barely gets an uptick (and a majority still say no). And now I'm switching to Olbermann and he says a CBS snap poll gives Biden the win. FiveThirtyEight.com says, "Biden won the CNN and CBS focus groups. Palin won the Luntz focus group." (UPDATE: Here are the CBS numbers -- 46%-21% Biden among uncommitted voters -- and the CNN numbers. Hot Air has a clip of the more pro-Palin focus group of Frank Luntz.)

And oh, this is terrific -- in the Media Curves focus group, Biden gets slightly more Democrats on every issue than Palin gets Republicans, and Biden gets between 62% and 72% of independents on every issue. That's a knockout.

This may be a good time to bring in something Aimai said in comments here before the debate:

... I actually think that the "fence sitters" are watching and making up their own minds--and the way they watch is so different from the way the horse race is scored that its not even on the same planet. From reading around the words of independents/swing voters I just get the sense that for a lot of these people the big issues are just too big for Sarah Palin's trademark brand of cute'n bitchy. She's actually a bit too 2004, if you know what I mean. Right now people see the country as having huge problems--the financial crisis has nominally pushed the other stuff, like the environment and the war, off the front pages but in a funny kind of way its conributed to a larger/deeper sense that this is some kind of massive kali yug like moment which requires a really serious response. As McCain discovered even cranky, old guy, bitchiness was not a great selling point for undecided voters and former republicans who are waking up from an eight year slumber to find their country gone. I really don't think miss cutie pie "pyeuw! pwyeu!" I can shoot a moose is going to do more than piss people off.

I think that's right. I think that's a big part of why Biden is winning the snap polls (that and the fact that Biden represent a different set of policies and priorities). Maybe in 2000 or even 2004 Palin would be the popular favorite, but it's a new world now.

(I added a link to Aimai's comment.)

*****

And Pere Ubu is right about this:

Bible Spice stood there and talked to the American people as if we were a classroom of rather dim high school students, but she's the new teacher and she's just so HIP and talks like we do donchaknow and she's on our side and just think of her as a friend now!

Or maybe like a new manager for a bunch of minimum-wage drones and there's been some tough times but she's ready to start workin' and everyone's full of energy and let's go out there an' stock those shelves and do our best yay hurrah!

I don't know if he's right about Palin wearing a wire, but possibly....

FOR CHRISSAKE

Stop winking at us, Sarah. It's not cute.

PREDICTION

After this debate, we're all going to say, "And we thought Joe Biden might treat Sarah Palin in a patronizing manner?"

THE PASSION OF THE PALIN

I see that the Democrat-hating L.A. Times blogger Andrew Malcolm refers to the McCain campign's limitations on access to Sarah Palin as a "Hanoi strategy." Y'know -- as in the torture prisons of the Vietnam War.

Simultaneously, MacRanger of the right-wing blog Macsmind says that what the mainstream media is doing to Palin when it does question her is "gang rape."

Come on, righties -- there's got to be more where that came from.

Lynching -- who's got lynching?

Or how about some concentration-camp metaphors? Or crucifixion?

Drawing and quartering and half-hanging? The thumbscrew? Acid in the face? Hot lead enema?

Folks, they're asking her germane questions. What could be more sick, horrifying, and brutal?

****

(Macsmind link via mantis in comments.)

IF PALIN BRINGS HER "A" GAME, IS THAT NECESSARILY GOOD FOR HER AND McCAIN?

The New Republic's Michelle Cottle thinks tonight will be a good night for Sarah Palin. Cottle thinks that the press is ready to write a Sarah Palin comeback story, and she expects that Palin will give a performance tonight that resembles her election-winning 2006 gubernatorial debates, rather than her recent car-wreck interviews. Cottle expects Palin to deploy her "solid ability to tap dance around questions she can't or doesn't want to answer," and adds this:

She also thrives when there is another candidate or candidates to play off of--often by employing a kind of motherly scolding to suggest that her opponents are being naughty and childish.... And while Biden isn't the stuffed shirt that some of Palin's '06 competitors were, he does look--and often sounds--every inch the political-establishment type that Palin has made a career of dismembering with her cutting remarks and cutesy nose scrunching.

Nastiness has certainly worked for Palin in the past and nastiness is the M.O. of the McCain campaign, so, yes, I think Palin will try to deploy some belittling zingers (accompanied by that damn nose scrunching), and there's a pretty good chance that she'll connect with one or two of barbs.

But is that really going to help her? I'm not sure.

On the one hand, I think the press would like to write a "Palin Upset Victory!" story. On the other hand, everyone's forgotten that even in her moment of Republican convention triumph, a lot of people just didn't like her. And one of the things they specifically didn't like about her was the gleeful meanness of her speech.

After the speech I posted some responses from focus-group members and other ordinary Americans who watched the speech. They included these:

... another woman added: "Once she started mudslinging, I thought, it's the same old crap as other politicians...."

"Thank you," another woman responded. "That really upset me; there was no need for that. It was snippy."

****

...in the home of another independent voter, Laura Bates, 45, of Madison, Conn., the reaction was more muted. "She gives a good speech, and she's talking to the people in her audience -- but she seems antagonistic, and I'm not impressed," said Bates, who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries. "I'd say it's about 100 percent I'd vote for Obama at this point. She hasn't really said anything constructive ... and she's been a little negative and smug."

****

This speech belongs on Jerry Springer, not on a national political stage. There are 5 potshot-punchlines at Democrats for every one statement about McCain. Tell us something positive about your ideals, not about the top ten quips you came up with yesterday…

****

I was very anxious to hear Palin’s speech to actually find what she is all about and am coming away very disappointed. I was actually embarrassed at certain points to be a woman myself as she came across EXTREMELY catty and juvenile....

And remember, that was before a boatload of nationally televised gaffes (and a couple of devastating Tina Fey sketches). These people were responding to someone they hadn't formed a strong opinion about. Now a lot of them have, and it's not a positive opinion.

I don't want to downplay the possibility that the press will declare Palin's debate performance a triumph and no dissent on the public's part will be able to counter that message. But I think it's possible that Palin might regret using her best weapon, the shiv.

FAILURE HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS

What I find most striking about Sarah Palin's inability to name a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade that she disagrees with is that this would be a ridiculously easy question for a wide range of righties -- not just political pros but online wingnut amateurs. Um, the banning of public-school prayer? That still gets ordinary right-wingers' juices flowing. How about the recent eminent-domain case Kelo v. New London? That one infuriated the Freepers. Or what about the decisions that have tried to constrain the White House's detention policies -- Boumediene v. Bush, for instance? That one also had Freeper knickers in a twist. So Palin isn't just less informed than the average VP candidate -- she's less informed than thousands of random message-board and blog devotees on the far right.

The standard response to that is, of course, "What the hell was John McCain thinking?" But I want to know: what was the right-wing punditocracy thinking? The Palin pick, after all, wasn't just some ramblin'-gamblin' roll of the dice John McCain made in isolation. A lot of conservative opinion-mongers thought she'd be a swell VP choice, too, and said so a while ago. Did it never occur to them that she might be totally unqualified? Were they just too smitten to inquire?

The key text to read on the subject is this New Republic story by Dave Jamieson. As Jamieson explains, Fred Barnes was the first big-league righty to get the Palin bug, after meeting her on a Weekly Standard cruise that stopped in Alaska. He published this glowing write-up of Palin in the Standard in July '07. By the summer of '08 -- a couple of months before McCain made his pick -- Palin, as Jamieson notes, was being touted as an excellent VP choice by the likes of Bill Kristol, Larry Kudlow, Glenn Beck, and Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention. What were these people thinking?

Oh, and as I've noted before, there was also a mysterious suggestion, in the October 2007 issue of the hoity-toity magazine Monocle, that there'd been "gossip" about Palin as a possible running mate for then-GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani. Just imagine that -- a guy who knows nothing whatsoever about foreign policy (apart from three numbers) with Palin as his VP pick. Who exactly was "gossiping" about that?

A lot of allegedly bright and well-informed righties were spreading the word in their insular little world that Palin was a real pistol and would make a hell of a VP. They didn't seem aware that she didn't know a damn thing about the subject matters that concern the Executive Branch -- they didn't know this or they didn't care. Did she just titillate them? Did they assume that anyone with a conservatively correct set of positions on a few issues would just do things their way on other issues by instinct? Or is their contempt for the very existence of government so deep-seated that they actually didn't care that she was totally unqualified, just so long as she could help get 50% of the electorate plus one to the polls?

PROJECTION MUCH, SARAH?

Good grief -- did Sarah Palin actually tell Sean Hannity on the radio today that she thinks the mainstream media is "trying to censor some of my comments"?

Yup, about 40 seconds into this audio clip.

Uh, Sarah? You're the one who's been freezing out the media. The few words you've deigned to utter to mainstream journalists have all been aired by now, no?

Or do you just think that "censor" is a synonym for "criticize"?

WILL ROUNDS UP THE USUAL SUSPECT

George Will today on the financial meltdown:

...a timeless political trope is: Government should budget the way households supposedly do, conforming outlays to income. But the crisis came partly because so many households decided that it would be jolly fun to budget the way government does, hitching outlays to appetites.

That's a load of crap. The crisis came because so many households decided that it would be jolly fun to budget the way rich people do, as if we could afford whatever we wanted -- and financial institutions decided it was fiscally prudent to let us, more or less.

Ever since the days of one of Will's principal objects of worship, Ronald Reagan, we've been told to model ourselves on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and anyone who didn't find the lives of the rich enchanting -- in fact, anyone who questioned the notion that those who'd amassed great wealth set a moral example for all of us -- was deemed a sixties-throwback hippie and commie. The most persistently admired person of the Reagan and post-Reagan era has probably been Donald Trump, a man who's noteworthy for nothing but wealth, and the esteem in which he's held has persisted even through his multiple bankruptcy filings. But even when he's broke, life looks pretty sweet for him. So we thought: Why shouldn't we live as much like that as we can?

Nobody in America wants to grow up to be Harry Reid. All kinds of people want to grow up to be Donald Trump. That's your Saint Ronnie's doing, George.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS

You can have Sarah Palin interview answers as generated using a Markov chain ...

...or you can have the McCain/Palin joint interview if Palin were replaced by Larry the Cable Guy.

Either way, hilarity ensues.

****

(Link #1 via LGM.)

ABOUT THAT "PRO-OBAMA" BOOK BY GWEN IFILL ...

I haven't read a word of Gwen Ifill's forthcoming book, and, as far as I know, not one of the Fox News-ites, veteran online right-wing attack dogs, and grandstanding bloggers who've declared it "pro-Obama" claims to have read any of it either.

But it's obvious, based on the publisher's description of the book and its promotional video, that this is a fairly wonky book, the primary purpose of which is not to tell you how wonderful Obama and his fellow new-style African-American politicians are. Instead, it's clearly a work of history, its purpose being to explain what the old style of black politics was, how things have changed, and why the change occurred.

The publisher's description:

In THE BREAKTHROUGH, veteran journalist Gwen Ifill surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential campaign and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power.

Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, and also covers up-and-coming figures from across the nation. Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the "black enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.

THE BREAKTHROUGH is a remarkable look at contemporary politics and an essential foundation for understanding the future of American democracy.

And here's the video -- same message:



Ifill, in the video:

The title of the book is The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. It's taking the story of Barack Obama and extending it to talk about a whole new generation of black politicians who are doing very similar things in very different ways. They're younger, they're more likely to get to power not by marching in marches, the way their parents did, or by leading protests -- they have decided to do it by getting educations, basically walking through the doors that their parents opened and choosing public service in a different way.

This isn't hero-worship -- it's analysis.

Is Ifill going to make a truckload more money on this book if Obama wins? No way. This book isn't going to be a bestseller -- it's just too poli-sci. Yes, if Obama wins, it (and a dozen or so other books) will be on bookstore display tables next to Obama's own books and possibly a quickie book or two on the campaign, just in time for the inauguration -- but Ifill's book is about societal trends, not big dramas or big personalities. An Obama win will give only a small boost to sales that won't be huge in any case.

And what about the title? Doesn't Ifill need an Obama win to validate it? Well, titles can change -- remember how often Jonah Goldberg's did. (Just FYI, Goldberg and Ifill share a publisher.) But there should be no need for a title change -- win or lose in November, Barack Obama is unquestionably the most successful African-American politician of this age. And that would be true even if he'd fallen just short of Hillary Clinton in the primaries and she'd picked Bill Richardson as a running mate -- no black office-seeker ever ran up as many victories, in lily-white states and racially mixed states, as Obama has.

There's just one sentence in the Ifill video that gives me the slightest pause: Ifill says of the four politicians she's profiling,

They all chose to get into politics for the most upstanding of reasons.

On the other hand, what mainstream journalist hasn't said something like that about John McCain? You'd have to turn to Perez Hilton if you wanted a debate moderator who hasn't lavished that kind of praise on the GOP nominee at one time or another.

NEVER MIND

This new Pew poll is pretty amazing:

Barack Obama has achieved a significant lead over John McCain in the days following the first presidential debate. Pew's new survey conducted Sept. 27-29 finds that Obama has moved to a 49% to 42% advantage among registered voters. The race was virtually even in mid-September and early August. Obama had not led McCain by a significant margin in a Pew survey since June.

... opinions about Sarah Palin have become increasingly negative...

... Since mid-September, Obama has garnered more support from ... those in the battleground states, where he now holds a 52% to 39% lead....

OK. I'm happy now.

****

TIME, TOO: Obama 50%, McCain 43%, with a 17-point lead among women....

****

AND: These Time state polls are shockingly good, too -- Obama up by 10 in Virginia and 8 in Florida, with all minor-party candidates included? Obama up in Missouri and Nevada? Plus a double-digit lead in Minnesota? Whew!

SARAH PALIN'S DEBATE PERFORMANCE, BEFORE IT HAPPENS

All of a sudden, a lot of people -- a former gubernatorial opponent as well as writers for Politico, The Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, and the Huffington Post -- are reminding us that Sarah Palin debated a lot in her 2006 race for governor and often came away from those debates as the apparent winner. No, obviously, she wasn't the candidate who had the best command of the facts -- but she often made her lack of knowledge seem like a virtue, and she worked to simulate a sense of intimacy with the voters.

So what does that mean for tomorrow night? Well, in my last post I gave you the questions from Hugh Hewitt's wet kiss of an interview with Palin yesterday. Palin's going to get somewhat more difficult questions tomorrow night. But I think her answers are a preview of how she'll feint and dodge (without appearing to feint or dodge) when she doesn't know what she's talking about, or when she just wants to go for cheap emotion.

Economy? Talk about herself and Todd:

I know what Americans are going through. Todd and I, heck, we're going through that right now even as we speak, which may put me again kind of on the outs of those Washington elite who don't like the idea of just an everyday working class American running for such an office. But yeah, there's been a lot of times that Todd and I have had to figure out how we were going to pay for health insurance. We've gone through periods of our life here with paying out of pocket for health coverage until Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs. Early on in our marriage, we didn't have health insurance, and we had to either make the choice of paying out of pocket for catastrophic coverage or just crossing our fingers, hoping that nobody would get hurt, nobody would get sick. So I know what Americans are going through there. And you know, even today, Todd and I are looking at what's going on in the stock market, the relatively low number of investments that we have, looking at the hit that we’re taking, probably $20,000 dollars last week in his 401K plan that was hit. I’m thinking geez, the rest of America, they’re facing the exact same thing that we are.

Iraq? Talk about Track:

I'm proud that my son made this independent and very wise decision as such a young man at 18, deciding you know, he realized there's something he can do to help, to contribute, to help protect our nation, and I couldn't be more proud of him and all those who choose to serve in our military. They're serving for the right reasons. God bless them, God love them.

Social issues? Talk about religion in a seemingly nonthreatening and tolerant way:

...my personal faith is very, very simple. I don't belong to any church. I do have a strong belief in God, and I believe that I'm a heck of a lot better off putting my life in God's hands, and saying hey, you know, guide me. What else do we have but guidance that we would seek from a Creator? That's about as simple as it gets with my faith... I do have respect for those who have differing views than I do on faith, on religion.

She can fill up a lot of time with this stuff. She can bump the "cares about people like me" number way up.

Will it work? Maybe not -- let's hope the very smart people on Team Obama have a counterstrategy (maybe the plan, reported by Politico, to "keep the focus on the top of the ticket" will pay off, by making it seem as if Palin doesn't want to talk in any detail about the policies of her, er, running mate). But I wouldn't bet the rent money on an utter Palin failure.

THIS IS WHAT REPUBLICANS THINK ALL INTERVIEWS OF PALIN SHOULD BE LIKE

Or maybe I should say this is what Republicans think all interviews of Republicans should be like. Here are the questions right-wing radio blowhard Hugh Hewitt asked Palin yesterday. You want "deference"? You got it:

HH: Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?

HH: Now Governor, the Gibson and the Couric interview struck many as sort of pop quizzes designed to embarrass you as opposed to interviews. Do you share that opinion?

HH: Have you followed the attacks on you, say, via Drudge or the blogs? Some of them are just made up and out of left field, others are just mocking. Do you follow those?

HH: Governor, you mentioned the people who are struggling right now. Have you and your husband, Todd, ever faced tough economic times where you had to sit around a kitchen table and make tough choices?

HH: Governor, when you say things are tight right now, is that simply because of Todd being off not working? Or is it because of extraordinary demands on the fiscal resources of the Palin family? What's the situation there?

HH: Governor, let's turn to a couple of issues that the MSM's not going to pick up. You're pro-life, and how much of the virulent opposition to you on the left do you attribute to your pro-life position, and maybe even to the birth of, your decision, your and Todd's decision to have Trig?

HH: Do you think the mainstream media and the left understands your religious faith, Governor Palin?

HH: Governor, let's close with some foreign affairs. It is reported that you had an Israeli flag in your governor's office. You wore an Israeli flag pin occasionally. One, is that true? And two, why your support for Israel?

HH: Last question, Governor. Have you and Todd heard from your son? And how is it on your nerves having your son deployed?

That's the complete list of questions. That's what all journalism would be like in the wingnut utopia.

(Via TBogg.)