Sarah Palin was ambushed by Charlie Gibson with a gotcha question about the Bush Doctrine. Well, maybe Palin isn’t an expert on the current president’s doctrine, but, as her hero Virginia Woolf would have it, the governator has a doctrine of one’s own, the Palin Doctrine, which strikes a balance between governmental largess and governmental neglect.
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The much ballyhooed “Palin effect” on the McCain campaign and GOP efforts in general is no more. Or, if there is a Palin effect, it's likely a negative one. The evidence is in today's Research 2000 poll for DKos. Palin has higher unfavorables than favorables. Here's the gap between her positives and negatives over the past week:
Sept. 11: +17 (day the Gibson interview airs)
Sept. 12: +14
Sept. 13: +9
Sept. 14: +5
Sept. 15: +4
Sept. 16: +1
Sept. 17: -1 (today)
Today, 45% report an unfavorable view of Palin compared to 44% who have a positive view. John McCain has been trending down daily as well from a recent mark of +13 down to today's +3. By comparison, Barack Obama is +18 and Joe Biden +17.
If you don't trust the Research 2000 poll you can find the same trend in other polls, a sharp decline in favorability over the last week. Palin will be an anchor for the McCain campaign which explains this.
Yesterday, five Alaska lawmakers–all Republicans–sued to stop the legislatures official, bipartisan Troopergate investigation. Their lawyer, Anchorage attorney Kevin Clarkson, sent out an email overnight, accusing Democrats inovolved in the investigation of… being Democrats:
“The Partisan actions of Sen. French, Sen. Elton and the Legislative Council have tainted the investigation beyond the appearance of impartiality required under the Alaska Constitution,” said Kevin Clarkson, Esq., of the firm Brena, Bell & Clarkson, P.C., and counsel in the suit.
The investigation, which began after Monegan’s dismissal in July 2008, is being led by outspoken supporters of Barack Obama and members of the Democratic Party. Sen. Elton, the Chair of the Legislative Council donated $2,000 to the Obama campaign but has failed to disclose this to the Legislative Council and he continues to preside over the Council with respect to the investigation, refusing to convene meetings of the Council at the request of a majority of the Council’s membership.
In fact, the GOP-majority Senate Legislative Coucil met last Friday, and issued 13 subpeonas, with a Wasilla Republican casting the deciding vote in defiance of mounting party pressure to fall into line. Palin herself has been silenced, with GOP operatives talking to the press in place of her, and, apparently, the entire Alaska executive branch. Meanwhile, AP reports the involvement of the Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute, which TPM explains is connected to James Dobson. Alaska blogger/radio host and former GOP legislator Andrew Halcro has a list of 13 times–from July 18 to September 2–that Palin pledged full cooperation with “any investigation.” (full list on flip).
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Even as Obama is moving ahead of McCain, not all is lost for the senior Senator from Arizona. While Palin was more popular than McCain, only twelve days later McCain is now comfortably outperforming Palin.
Today, a new poll from Rasmussen shows Obama leading Palin 50%-43%, while at the same time McCain led Obama by 1%. McCain also outperformed Palin in a hypothetical match-up against Biden.
Palin’s favorable ratio has also dropped from +21% to +14%, including a 10% increase in her “very unfavorable” rating in just eleven days. That is about 1% of the country shifting toward a “very unfavorable” opinion of Palin every day for the last eleven days. That, um, isn’t very, um, good.
The sheen is starting to wear off on Palin. The major problem, I think, is her inability to produce new content. Spending an entire week preparing for a new speech or interview doesn’t give people much to work with. In the down time, it is easier to expose lies about bridges, jokes about hockey moms grow stale, and faux outrage about said jokes gets played out fast. In politics, you have to produce new content in order to grab headlines and win news cycles, but Palin just isn’t producing much new content. Further, what she little she does produce will always be worse than her convention speech.
Ironically, Palin raised her expectations so high after the convention, that it is virtually impossible for her to ever meet them now. Of course, she only pulled that off because expectations were lowered so massively before her speech. The irony is delicious.
I just got back from a dermatologist for a check-up (growing up in Miami with outdoor summers requires this), and I asked her about McCain and skin cancer. He’s had various types of the disease and I wanted to get a sense of whether he’s really in danger or if this is one of those treatable forms of cancer. And she told me that basically, some skin cancers are not that bad, but malignant melanoma – the kind McCain has had in two separate places – is not one of those. It’s bad. Real bad. And unlike most cancers, it doesn’t really go away, even after years in remission. Sam Donaldson had it on his ankle, and thirteen years later it returned in the same spot. McCain has had it on two separate ‘primaries’ (not recurrences, which aren’t as bad), and you can clearly see the post-surgical scars of having his lymph nodes checked (and partially removed). This is not a healthy guy, this is a 72 year old man with a fairly high likelihood of serious illness and death within the next few years.
I asked Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican, about John McCain’s cancer, and he said that McCain is in remission. The video is above. You can see above that Kyl is taken aback, but he says that he trusts what John McCain told him. But why? That might be good enough for a Republican Senator, but why should that be the test for the voters? Why should we trust McCain on his medical past? It’s not just that McCain has stretched the truth in this campaign, as even Karl Rove noted, or that he’s acted as desperately as you’d expect a dying man to act when stretching for his lifelong dream of the Presidency, it’s that McCain has simply refused to release his medical records to the public and confined select members of the press to a three hour window with no electronic equipment to examine his records. Brave New Films is on this question, and more than a thousand doctors have signed up to ask him to release his medical records. You should sign this petition and watch the video, it is downright scary. While this race is between Obama and McCain, President Palin is not an unlikely outcome (as Matt Damon noted).
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There is an article in today’s Salon called “The pastor who clashed with Palin” By David Talbot which concerns itself with Sarah Palin’s religious fundamentalism as it relates to government.
The primary focus of the article is the interactions between Palin and Howard Bess, a retired Baptist preacher from Wasilla’s nearby neighbor town Palmer, Alaska. Bess, the author of a book entitled “Pastor, I am gay,” originally came into conflict with Palin over book banning, and eventually on other social issues as well.
One issue was abortion. This from the article:
Soon after the book controversy, Bess found himself again at odds with Palin and her fellow evangelicals. In 1996, evangelical churches mounted a vigorous campaign to take over the local hospital’s community board and ban abortion from the valley. When they succeeded, Bess and Dr. Susan Lemagie, a Palmer OB-GYN, fought back, filing suit on behalf of a local woman who had been forced to travel to Seattle for an abortion. The case was finally decided by the Alaska Supreme Court, which ruled that the hospital must provide valley women with the abortion option.
The thing that shook me up the most in the article was a quote from another local progressive that raises the issue of Palin’s knowledge, beliefs and clear danger if she were to become president:
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’
“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”
Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'”
And this from Bess:
Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That’s trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It’s her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she’s ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. She gave some indication of that thinking in her ABC interview, when she suggested how willing she would be to go to war with Russia.
It is the clear danger of extreme religious views combined with the age and health history of John McCain that should make all voters review the potential of a radical creationist with a finger on the nuclear (noo-clee-ar) button.
The latest line of defense for John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, on the Troopergate Scandal, simply doesn’t hold up one millisecond for those who know the story so far. As noted by mcc in a quick hit, the AP is reporting that Palin’s administration has released a batch of emails supporting a claim that Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan was fired over budget disagreements, not because he refused to fire Palin’s ex-brother-in-law, Mike Wooten.
There’s just one thing wrong with this: it’s a Rovian coverup involving more lies and deception than you can throw a stick at. Indeed, if it were true, there would have been no “Troopergate” in the first place. The whole scandal began when Palin had a subordinate fire Monegan, without giving any reason. If this were truly why he was fired, then why didn’t she just say so? Particularly since the failure to explain her actions caused an immediate stir in Alaska at the time.
On July 20, the Anchorage Daily Newswrote:
THE HONEYMOON IS OVER … So, will our Sarah change her claim of “transparency” to merely “translucence” given her refusal to say why she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan?
“Opaque?”
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In part two of Sarah Palin’s interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, she gives lipstick-y lip service to the notion that human beings may, in fact, be contributing to climate change. What a difference a month (and a nomination) makes! ‘Cause back in August, before John McCain singled Palin out as our nation’s foremost expert on energy, Alaska’s climate change denier-in-chief told Newsmax.com that “I'm not one though who would attribute [global warming] to being man-made.”
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America's gut reaction to Sarah Palin has been positive, and so her stumbles during the Charlie Gibson interview might not really settle in.
Based on the data we have, this is false. Palin is in a favorability free fall. In just 4 days, since her interview with Gibson in fact, the gap between those who view her favorably and those who hold unfavorable views has almost disappeared. According to Research 2000 polling, more than half the country held a favorable opinion of Palin during the 3 days prior to Sept. 11 (52%) while 35% held unfavorable attitudes. That was the day the Gibson interview aired. The 17-point net positive has fallen, as of today, to just 4 points:
Sept. 11: +17 net positive
Sept. 12: +14
Sept. 13: +9
Sept. 14: +5
Sept. 15 (today): +4
Palin is by far the least popular of the 4 candidates for Pres./VP and I don't think her slide is over yet. Because she is McCain's creation, she is taking him down as well. He had a +13 net positive just three days ago, then +12, then +9 and today just +6. By comparison both Barack Obama and Joe Biden are holding steady at +16 net positives.
As I argued yesterday, Palin can help drag down McCain. Certainly, in the end, it's about McCain. He decided she was the best prepared after all. Her inadequacy tells voters so much about McCain that bad news about her will continue to hurt him as well.
There's been some debate over the relative advantage or disadvantage of the Obama campaign focusing too much on Sarah Palin. In a moment, I'll give an argument why focusing on her is win-win-win.
First, though, the tracking poll numbers. These were covered earlier today in quick hits but I'll recap here because the news is good for a change. McCain's lead in the tracking poll average had been in the 1-to-2 point range for almost a full week but today dropped to just a 0.25 point lead, 46.25 to 46.0. So my bold prediction from yesterday of the lead falling below 1 today was correct (full numbers on the inside).
Now, back to Palin. One of the 4 tracking polls, Research 2000 for dKos, has some interesting internals which show Palin in a steep favorability dive. Follow along for more.
Update: Almost forgot. I'd like to thank Tina Fey for accepting my plea for her to make cameos as Palin on SNL this fall.
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Generally, when I do a diary, I want to have something to say. Something to make you think. I want it to be worthwhile even if you disagree with me-or even, especially if you disagree with me. But lately things have been going so fast, it’s genuinely hard to digest things fast enogh to post about them before something else even more timely and thought-provoking comes along. And so the backlog grows.
Well, it stops here! Err… would you believe it slows down briefly to gawk at a roadside attraction? Well, never mind. Here’s an emergency catch-up potpouri, designed, if nothing more, to relieve some feelings of guilt I’m dealing with none too successfully. First up, John Dean’s observations on Sarah Palin’s lack of qualifications from a Constitutional perspective. Oh, she’s not forbidden to be President, Dean says, but…
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Anonymous Liberal, who some of you may remember from his occasional pinch hits for Glennzilla, makes a point worth highlighting, The Media’s Moment of Truth:
This election is a test of the political media in this country. If journalists can’t find a way to dissuade the use of flagrant dishonesty as a tactic, they will have failed this country miserably.
A moment of truth, and a moment for truth.
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I find current discussions about the campaign sort of strange. There are lots of people saying Obama isn’t ‘going after McCain’ or ‘going negative’ or isn’t ‘on message’. I’ve seen this piece on HuffPo passed around at least five times, which emphasizes that he must go negative and stay on message. I hear that he must ‘fight back’ against McCain’s sleaze with a consistent theme.
What’s odd about these conversations is that they don’t acknowledge that Obama is doing just that. I blogged earlier about the attack ads Obama ran against McCain, all on economic themes. Why ignore them? Why assume he’s not making criticisms when he is?
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(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
The series grew rather long, so I want to concentrate on its basic premise, why it is so, and why it matters to us right now. The bottom line of all this simple: there is no silver bullet. No matter how brilliant you think your idea is, even if you’re absolutely right, it won’t be enough to win the election. It’s not silver bulletts, but systemic approaches that win elections, and beyond, build political power over time.
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Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success….
Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned.
There were two rallies in Anchorage on Saturday. An indoor one for Palin drew maybe 1000, according to AKMuckraker, who infilrated it, an outdoor one against Palin drew upwards of 1400 at its peak. The national GOP got out-organized by a group of women having coffee together just last Wednesday.
Philip Munger who blogs at Progressive Alaska has a Facebook gallery of rally photos here.
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The Obama campaign must be troubled by the professional feminist wing of its support, which just can’t help itself, it must comment endlessly on Sarah Palin. And then conservatives happily respond, and we spend another news day talking about Sarah and her rifle, Sarah and the polar bears, Sarah and her pregnant daughter, and so on and so forth. Did even the brilliant Karl Rove realize how bountiful a gift the Palin selection would be to the McCain campaign? How is it that our news continues to be dominated by this lady, veering the election (permanently, apparently) off the winning issue for Obama, the economy, and making it all about populist style, where he loses?
Well, let’s have Katha Pollitt of The Nation magazine (which fronts its page today with ‘Sarah and the polar bears‘ (gee, the environmentalists can’t help making it ‘all about Sarah’ either!) help you there. This ‘important feminist’ (her heretofore mucho Obamaism taking a backseat for however long) just can’t help herself, in her latest column — Lipstick on a Wingnut (a way to talk about or to right-wing Christians that ain’t) — she has to keep up the attacks on Palin, and she’s willing to make them anti-feminist, whatever will make sure we all know that the Palins of this world will never usurp the culturally ‘liberal’ feminist leadership. Here’s the anti-feminist rant parts of just the first paragraph:
the supremely under-qualified Sarah Palin
She talks incessantly about being a mother of five
[She] uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop.
If you wonder how she’ll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you’re a super-sexist.
Palin . . . went back to work when Trig was three days old
her five-months-pregnant 17-year-old, Bristol
Okay, and in sum: even if it were strategically not dumb-assed to help keep the focus ‘Palin 24/7’, that’s a non-rational, insinuating, anti-feminist, and non-issues-focused first paragraph.
But back to my main amazement: Will the (ostensibly all establishment Democrat) ‘leaders’ of the feminist ‘community’ ever get off Sarah Palin ass? Well, nope, I don’t think so, not even if it fatally hurts Obama’s chances of winning in November. Why? Well, besides pressing their most cherished ‘culturally correct’ buttons, Palin is a challenge to feminist officialdom’s authority:
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The Alaskan blog, Mudflats had a fun post last night, Palin Friday Frivolity! which was devoted to the question, “What would your name be if you were born to Todd and Sarah Palin?”
My name, as it turns out, would have been Mustache Warthog Palin–information provided by the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator.
As Mudflats notes, the Palins have employed some rather odd naming conventions–more on that on the flip–and this site gives you the chance to enter their world, while still keeping your physical distance.
Now here’s a game for you before jumping to the flip: Match the Open Left founder with their Palin family name:
GIBSON: Didn’t George Bush come to Washington eight years ago talking about reforming Washington in the same kind of language? Ran as something of a maverick actually; came to Washington. Eight years, hasn’t changed the ethos in Washington particularly. Why are you any different?
PALIN: Well, we’re promising the reform. And we are mavericks. There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind now across America, who’s paying attention to the presidential race here, that I am a Washington outsider. I mean, look at where you are. I’m a Washington outsider. I do not have those allegiances to the power brokers, to the lobbyists. We need someone like that in Washington, someone committed to the American people and implementing their will, not the power brokers’ will.
Shorter:
GIBSON: How are your lies different from George Bush’s?
PALIN: To be honest, they’re not. But who’s honest?
My brother pointed out that in Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson, she empathizes with the American people by saying ‘Everybody’s got issues, everybody’s got burdens’ while standing in front of the mansion she and her husband built two years ago and her own seaplane. And it’s worth noting that she has not released her tax records, though to be fair, my guess is that Palin does remember how many houses she has.
Ah, being a member of the political elite has its rewards.
Your own private seaplane? $150k.
Mansion on a private lake? Who knows?
Being able to bill your government for a travel allowance while staying at your mansion? $16,951.
Letting your family and husband who is under investigation by the state for abuse of power charge the state for travel as well? $43,490
Covering up your own corruption and greed with lies about Barack Obama? Priceless.
For nearly two weeks now, I’ve been suffering from a newly-minted malady called Palin-paralysis–a nasty tv-transmitted virus I caught after watching Sarah Palin’s divisive and derisive acceptance speech. You know, that salute to “small town values” that lionized plucky, scrappy hockey moms and demonized yucky, crappy community organizers.
The primary symptoms are nausea, a perpetually clenched jaw, and a half-baked Alaska-induced brain freeze; can’t get out of bed, can’t blog, can’t even blog in bed. The surreal spectacle of the Palin pick, the depth of cynicism and carelessness that it demonstrated, and the embrace of this ludicrous choice for veep by so many folks is truly appalling. As Matt Damon told the AP:
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I feel very frustrated right now because I have a difficult time pinning down the cause of McCain’s continued polling increase. Obama peaked toward the end of June, and apart from the Democratic convention, has been on a slow, downward trend ever since. I want to know why this is the case, because I want to understand how this trend can be reversed. It is only from that point that I believe I can develop better ideas on what I can do personally to help positively influence the result.
Why is McCain performing well, relative to where the general election was in June? In the extended entry, I explore some possibilities, and offer a path toward figuring out which is correct.
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Sarah Palin's “perhaps” in response to the question of whether we might have to go to war with Russia over Georgia is getting a lot of attention. The truth, though, is that Palin was doing little more that drawing out the logical inference of McCain & Co.'s unhinged policy vis a vis Russia — not a huge surprise if you've just learned the policy in the last week. But McCain and those in his entourage at least have the seasoning to know not to traipse into throwaway hypotheticals about 'war' with the only other country in the world with a vast and eminently deliverable nuclear arsenal.
Georgia10 at dKos:
How absolutely, head-in-the-ground oblivious do you have to be to our national politics to not be familiar with the Bush Doctrine, the very cornerstone of this administration's foreign policy and the doctrine that led us into the most disastrous foreign policy decision in American history?
Oh, that's right. This oblivious:
“I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq.”
Andrew Sullivan:
I'm not sure how to respond because I believe the entire last two weeks have been a farce, and ABC News is now an integral, enabling part of that farce…… All I have learned thus far is that a McCain administration would be prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia and will never, ever criticize or oppose any decision made by the government of the state of Israel. And I knew that already.
As ABC is set to run a puff-piece celebrity interview with Sarah Palin, I would hit her hard ahead of time, if I were running Obama’s campaign. The hard hit would go directly at the GOP’s illusion of change, and serve to underscore how totally bogus the ABC interview will be.
How would I go about it? Simple: I’d link her to Richard Nixon, via Dick Cheney and GW Bush. The script I’d use is on the flip.
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On Wednesday, September 10, 2008, New York City saw puffy clouds, cool breezes and sunshine that gently bathed the city’s tall buildings in crisp golden sunlight. The bike path along the Hudson was filled with cyclists and joggers while on the streets, tourists made their way to places like Times Square or the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty.
Outside towers near Wall Street, office workers took smoking breaks enjoying the hints of autumn while others lunched on benches tossing an occasional crumb to pigeons while traffic whizzed by on the West Side Highway. From an observation deck of an individual life in the city, the island of Manhattan was enjoying a beautiful day.
Still, there is no doubt, countless New Yorkers have been engrossed by the ongoing nonsense gripping the current contest for the land’s most important political office a horse race that has recently been punctuated by references to dogs, swine and lipstick.
But with that captivation has come an increasing sense of worry and frustration, as many New Yorkers watch and listen to a political contest that has in many minds descended into a chaotic diversion and not a debate over party ideology, values and solutions.
Here it is, the second week of September and despite a Congressional Budget Office report saying the United States deficit is projected to rise to $407 billion, along with a continued rash of failing financial institutions, the nightmare of misled war in Iraq, a mere treading of water in the land of the Taliban, Afghanistan, despite the fact that 50 million un-insured, a disappearing middle class, the headlines are filled with talk of pitbulls, swine and lipstick, as if some sort of Animal Farm like fever had stolen the meat from the potato’s of reality that politics is meant to address.
Even on this day before the anniversary of what is arguably the city’s greatest tragedy, a crime of death, destruction and horror, a memory that still blips loudly on the radar screens of so many New Yorkers and Americans everywhere, text messages were being sent and phone calls made among political junkies who call themselves Democrat as they worried aloud that the party values they support were facing increasingly tremendous obstacles come November.
For many, some who call themselves transplants, those who originally come from places far away from the so called sophistication, the bustle and hustle, those who ran away to New York to exist in tolerance and acceptance, an added sense of urgency was setting in as polls showed increasing numbers for the party they held responsible for exploiting pain and tragedy for political gain.
They wondered why, in an election year where the baggage of the past administration would logically derail or simply, perhaps even dramatically sink any remnant of hope for Republicans maintaining control of the executive branch, the Democrats were still failing in their attempts to make victory, perhaps more appropriate, change, a “sure thing” in November
Since the days of September 11, 2001, New York City has moved on. Sure, the memories are still there, the pain, the hurt and the anger, but regardless, the busy lot that New Yorkers are, dictates staying on their toes, and that includes following politics.
In one phone call, a CEO of a small marketing firm downtown said that whomever devised the coronation of Sarah Palin as a running mate for the 25 year veteran of Congress was “simply genius.”
He went on to say that they, the Republican strategists, long ago mastered how to get into the psyche of America’s heartland.
Just what is that psyche?
In a chapter tilted Persecuted, Powerless and blind from his book “What’s the matter with Kansas”, author Thomas Frank asserts that in what he calls ‘red land’ “both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in disgust with those affected college boys at the next table, prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and the big ideas for running things that they read in books.
According to the transplant marketing exec in Manhattan, the people described in that book are his family, his family’s friends among others outside his current universe are the ones who see the antithesis of those college boys in Sarah Palin and John McCain.
“David Axelrod just got his head handed to him on a silver platter,” he yelled into his phone.
Not that the marketing exec is happy about that. Rather, he says, the Democrats, i.e. Obama and his team must rise up, perhaps take a humble pill, and somehow figure out how to “inspire” the reportedly “more than half” of the nation’s voters. He, his running mate and his surrogates must figure out a way to re-inject the hope that a better America is somehow attainable through the political process, a poisoned process that they can overcome, if they maintain their sincere message of opportunity for all.
To be fair, the marketing man on the phone was a Hillary supporter during the primary and as of just a few weeks ago, made no denials of his reluctance to grudgingly support the Obama-Biden ticket. But, with the new Alaska superstar stealing the thunder from everyone else in the campaign, he says he realized that his frustration was geared more towards the American people, and perhaps the media for not highlighting the crucial differences in the candidates and what it is they intend to do, or not do, once in power.
Plain and simple, how can Democrats spell out to the people that voting for the Republican candidate would most likely do little to change their lives from the current state it is in now?
Still, during the chat, he said some members of his own mostly politically moderate working class family had been energized by Palin simply because they can identify with her.
“They really don’t care about her stand on issues, it’s about a person that’s like them, not some fancy pants elite politician like Obama,” he said.
At that moment in the conversation, thinking back in political time to the Democratic Primaries, one can’t help but recall the moment that Senator Hillary Clinton seemed to wake up and embrace the populism espoused by the now “disgraced” John Edwards. It was at that point Clinton appeared to whip her campaign out of an entitled, arrogant state of being and began to aggressively market herself as someone who passionately embraced the populist issues of all the people in a manner that was purely political, but somehow sincere. In the waning days of her campaign, Clinton was able to work that political formula, while guzzling whiskey shots and beer all the way to several victories, but alas, to little to late.
For some reason, despite fact the Senator was indeed a Clinton, people began to believe, that this candidate would wake up every morning and fight for their interests. They saw someone who would seek to bridge the glaring economic inequity that had helped further foster the class divides of the states. Perhaps, they even began to believe that she was sincere.
It is imperative that the Obama campaign figure out its way in doing basically the same, perhaps not a carbon copy repeat of the Clinton awakening but certainly not the sad tit for tat insult show that the campaign has engaged in along with the Republicans. Otherwise, millions of Americans will continue on their quest to choose a candidate they can relate to.
Meanwhile, in New York City, the anniversary of that day that shook modern America to its very foundation, tested its resolve and for a brief shining moment, unified a nation so tightly, will come and go just like every other day.
The Democratic political world, more networked and faster-reacting than ever before (rumor and worry used to spread slower by phone than it does by internet) is- at least among my various networks- in a state of fast-moving panic regarding the Presidential campaign. While there is no reason to panic- it’s close, we’re not way behind; we still have almost two months before the election; we still have lots of meta-dynamics in our favor, etc.- there are some very legitimate reasons to be concerned.
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A DKos diary by DaveV shows that McCain’s bounce from the week of Aug 25-Aug 31 (DNC) to the week of Sept 1-7 (RNC) was driven by an 11% jump in the South:
And over the two-week period, from Aug 18-24 to Sept 1-7, McCain actually lost ground in the two most contested regions: down 2% in the West and down a whopping 7% in the Midwest:
Of course, this doesn’t tell us what’s happening this week on a regional basis. But it does tell us that the media’s narrative (and their own internal perception) of a national shift toward the GOP over this time period was without foundation, and–if Gallup is right–actually false. And this perceived shift has clearly helped the GOP, as their heightened level of lying is not seen for what it is–or at least began as: a sign of desperation.
UPDATED: Raw Numbers On Flip
There’s More…
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