Right Where We Want 'Em

Heh. Obama is launching ads in Arizona, Georgia and North Dakota. Now, these are some motherfucking red states. While recent polling suggests all of these states are marginally competitive, I don't expect Obama thinks he can win in these states. I agree with Nate Silver -- this is primarily a media strategy designed to demoralize the McCain campaign. It's like the burning of Atlanta in the Civil War.

I love McCain campaign manager Rick Davis' take in a memo to journalists tonight, characterizing the move as: "an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn't have the votes to win." What? The fact that these states are competitive rather than absolutely blood red at this point is somehow bad for Obama?

McCain's silly "we got 'em right where we want 'em" nonsense made me think of this:

Infomercial

I thought the Obama infomercial was pretty boring. In his effort to be substantive and to reach out to the few undecideds or soft republicans, he purposefully swung away from his lofty rhetoric into a mundane articulation of policy. Frankly, I think we could have used a jolt of his preachifying at this point -- we've seen enough policy on the stump. And the cut-away to him live at the end was totally anti-climactic.

But consider this: he did not mention Bush or McCain once during the 30 minutes. Never said, "Don't vote for him because ..." or "... failed policies of ..." Only talked about what he wanted to do. The future. Again, you may think he's the anti-christ, but the dude looked presidential.

Can you imagine McCain's 30 minutes in prime time?  Here's Juan Cole's take:

... if I had to guess, it would be ten minutes about McCain as a POW, ten minutes of McCain saying he isn’t Bush, and then ten minutes of bullshit smears about Ayers, Khalidi, socialism, celebrity, and maybe Rick Davis could go before the cameras and pull a tire gauge out of his ass. 

Cranky Asshole Update

As this most entertaining election cycle comes to a conclusion, I went back and read my Six Reasons post and felt I should update it with what I've learned in the eight weeks since I first wrote it.

I believe we've learned a lot about McCain's character and his fitness to govern from watching his campaign. And I think what we have learned is not positive, and leads me to conclude even more strongly that a vote for this man is not just a mistake, but an indictment of the voter's intelligence and powers of observation.

McCain's whole campaign has been about character. He really has not offered more than a crumb of policy discussion in the last several months. To the extent he has discussed them, his economic policies are incoherent -- like a moron reciting Ronald Reagan's talking points without really understanding the underlying issues (gee, kind of like every Sarah Palin interview, come to think of it).

What have we seen of McCain's "character"? We've seen a despicable, angry, name-calling jerk. He's an embarrassment to the American political culture. He's called his opponent a terrorist sympathizer (and doesn't object when others forget the "sympathizer" part and call Obama an actual terrorist); he's called him every 20th century name for commie that he can think of (socialist, marxist, redistributionist); he's called him naive, disloyal, dangerous, duplicitous, a Manchurian candidate, a fey academic, you name it. Pathetic.

This is McCain's character. A sense of senatorial entitlement and complete contempt for the American people as intelligent, cautious and independent-minded. Just yell a bunch of 1950's buzzwords and get them to vote with their emotions. The problem for the old bastard is that it ain't the 1950's any more.

And, once and for all, fuck John McCain's "service to our country" narrative (which, by way of reminder, was primarily as a POW in Vietnam; not exactly George Washington or Andrew Jackson or Ike territory, folks). If that's a reason to vote for him, we are a bunch of cretins. Any honor he accrued in Vietnam has been squandered in the sordid pathos of this campaign (and, before that, in the sordid personal history he accumulated post-war). He has absolutely no claim to being a viable commander in chief because of his captivity in Vietnam. It's completely idiotic.

More troubling even than the character issue is what we've learned about his fitness to govern. I'm not even going to get into the Palin pick -- all that needs to be said has been said better, by others. But back in August I wrote that he "surrounds himself with mediocre people" and the Palin pick is no exception. He has no interest in policy -- at a time of insane fragility of the American system of government and economy, this is reason enough not to vote for him. I believe he is clinically bi-polar, and I can't imagine a worse mental disorder to have in a president. He doesn't listen to anyone but himself. He's a compulsive gambler. The fatigue of the campaign trail has made him seem increasingly senile (his attempt to remember the 5th secretary of state who endoresed him on NBC was scary/pathetic). And he is going to die soon, perhaps very soon, leaving a potential power vacuum that defies historical comparison.

McCain is totally unfit to lead this nation. He really is George W. Bush with a little more gravitas -- dumb, narcissistic, mean-spirited, petty, anti-intellectual. We really don't need more of that shit.

HipLogic

HipLogic, one of the companies I invested in earlier this year, launched their platform today. Here's the video:



The conventional wisdom around Sand Hill Road is that the whole world will be running iPhones or Android phones in a couple of months, but as long-time readers know, I don't really buy that. In my conversations with carriers and handset manufacturers, they are looking for increased data services across their range of handsets, and the impending recession only makes that more urgent, as smartphone sales have fallen off in Europe and likely in the US as well.

The goals of the HipLogic platform are infinite personalization of the mobile experience, easy discovery of data services, and always-on connectivity. I think it's the right technology for the time.

And You Wonder ...

... why I believe we need not simply defeat these American Taliban -- we need to sow their fields with salt for a generation. Take a listen to this, all you jews, muslims, non-evangelical christians, city-dwellers, free-thinkers, etc.  

After a week during which we heard Palin call us anti-American by implication, some unhinged Minnesota congresswoman call for a McCarthyesque pogrom against the un-American members of congress, a McCain flack suggest northern Virginia isn't real because it isn't "southern" (code for conservative and xenophobic, oh, I mean "patriotic"), and the rising spectre of a Reverend Wright attack on Obama's patriotism, don't you think it's time we stopped viewing these people as simply ignorant and pathetic, and started viewing them as a threat to our democracy?

[UPDATE] Mea culpa. Leave it to the master ...

Palin, Revisited

I've mostly remained out of the fray as the left has picked apart Palin with a vengeance. But after a month of aggressive digging (and muckraking) by both the old and new media, I think some of the realities are starting to emerge.

Clearly, she's a not-very-bright small town/small state conservative. As such, she is scary to the coastal elites like all fly-over conservatives, because she's deeply religious in a freaky, enthusiastic, evangelical way; because she rejects the discourse of the traditional elites in favor of a know-nothing populism and fake "real America" patriotism (therefore, no press conferences prior to the election -- what good would that do? It would be about as useful as W. agreeing to debate theology with a panel of Wahhabi clerics); because she is into guns and snowmobiles and other stuff the elites find unpleasant. But that's not the crux of the problem.

There are two aspects of her biography that are actually quite troubling. And, no, it's not the fact that she's totally, completely unprepared for national office. Let's take that as a given.

The first is her absolute inability to tell the truth. Her ridiculous lies about her record and her abilities are really startling (Andrew Sullivan has done a good job of documenting them in his blog at the Altantic Monthly). She clearly believes it's ok to lie about almost anything to serve the higher cause of the mission from God that she is on, and to further ingratiate herself with that collection of xenophobes, fundamentalists, and rural conservatives who form her national base.

The second troubling aspect of the Palin bio can be found in the crevices of several of the stories about her -- namely, that she is largely an empty vessel, an instrument that has been played by a series of domineering men (her father, husband, minister and now a coterie of McCain handlers and conservative pundits). Hell, they won't even let her watch the news these days, so she doesn't get depressed, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. After all, they need her blindly swinging the axe for McCain. 

Combined with her lack of intellectual power and curiosity, this character trait makes Palin able to conduct the appallingly sleazy, racist McCain campaign while appearing as chipper as a Disney character. She seems to believe that Obama is un-American/muslim/terrorist in the same uncritical manner that she believes humans and dinosaurs co-existed 6,000 years ago -- because some male authority figure told her it was "true." (Well, perhaps not true in the sense that normal people use the word true, but true in the bizarro semiotic world her brain inhabits). The immoral stuff that makes McCain twitch in disgust is just water off this daffy duck's back.

What I'm more convinced of than ever is that Palin is decidedly not the future of American conservatism, despite the idiotic claims of Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard. If this election plays out the way it appears to be playing out, I believe the American conservative movement is headed for a great schism: the religionist wing (Palin, Huckabee) form one coalition around a few core social issues like abortion, while the ideological wing becomes the party in opposition, firing salvos at the Dems on big government and foreign policy. The latter will blame the former for losing this election (and with some legitimacy -- almost every conservative newspaper, for example, that has endorsed Obama has done so in part because of Palin).

They'll remain splintered until they find a Reagan/Clinton figure who can reunite them and move them to the center. Let's hope it doesn't happen for a good, long time.

GOTV

No, not Tom Ellsworth's mobile video company. "Get Out The Vote." The grassroots key to winning elections. Actually mobilizing the lazy, disaffected electorate to line up at the local church or school and cast an actual ballot.

You may disagree with Obama ideologically on policy (even I was a little freaked out by how many programs he said he wants to fund in last night's debate), but read this piece on how he has built his much-celebrated ground game to get out the vote, and you can't but be impressed that a politician has finally figured out how to run a top-down and bottom-up campaign in the modern world. If this "movement" has legs, the Republicans are in deep trouble for the future (as some of them are starting to acknowledge). If you want to know what he learned as a community organizer -- the element of his resume that pious Palin derides so aggressively -- this is it. And, ironically, it may crush the church-based Republican alternative for decades.

In the meantime, the Obama campaign is going on a red state offensive in the final 19 days. They are running ads in West Virginia. They are considering expanding their footprint to Georgia, North Dakota and Kentucky, while continuing their ad blitz in Florida, Missouri, Virginia and North Carolina. I can construct a (somewhat fanciful) scenario in which he breaks 400 electoral votes. On the other hand, my gut tells me that just won't happen. But I do think it's going to take a small miracle for McCain to keep it under 350.