Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Obama was exactly the type of candidate that Democrats always told themselves they could not nominate. He is – and we can admit this now – a somewhat aloof cultural elite. His story is actually quite alien to the experiences of many Americans. He is not bubba and does not relate well to the much ballyhooed white working class on a visceral, personal level. He is professorial and his appeal has often relied on rather ethereal notions of hope and change. Despite some rhetorical shadings on cultural issues and his aberrant views on gay marriage, he is an unabashed social liberal who, most importantly, is as blue-state as you can get. He has lived his entire adult life in either big cities or in college towns, he is the product of a mixed marriage and was a constituional law professor at an elite university. After Mark Penn couselled Hillary Clinton to portray Obama as alien to most Americans, he has managed to win over a country in impressive fashion. Remember, this is a man who can credibly “talk black” and references Jay-Z songs in his speeches. Democratic candidates are supposed to strain themselves to be middle-America, to appeal to the great White middle. Bill Clinton could do this easily and John Kerry embarrassed himself trying. Obama, thank god, only made a few attempts to do so, but kept his core identity – that of a rootless, biracial, coastal liberal – in tact. The crowd at Grant Part was a one million large sample of the majority that we have been told to never dream of since 1972. The young people were largely college students, white and black. The middle aged white folks were hard core Ira Glass fans – or ex hippies. And, of course, African Americans. The states that we turned blue – New Mexico, Virgina, Colorado – we did it on the strength of that coalition. Young people, professionals, racial minorities. And we did with a candidate who is clearly part of our coalition. We showed the country, with a commanding electoral and popular vote win, that we are as much a part of “real America” as Joe the Plumber or of any archetypal figure that we’ve been chasing down since Reagan. 

So yes, the black, constitutional law professor who made his political career in a large city, had a close, personal relationship with a black nationalist, cavorted with aging radicals, lived part of his life in a Muslim country and has the middle name Hussein won the election. And he did on the backs of people that Sarah Palin and much of the GOP wouldn’t recognize as part of our country.

I would describe what it was like to be in Grant Park, especially at 10 PM CST when my home state, California, put Obama over the top, but I really can’t. It was, literally, one million people who have been dispairing at the state of our political system for eight years who have invested so much in not only rejecting the ideas that animated that dark period, but even more in the man that’s supposed to lead us out of it. Even though we really knew the result when Pennsylvania and Ohio were projected for Obama, there was such utter jubiliation when CNN finally said that Obama was going to be in the next president. The crowd was also amazing, a true microcosm of the Obama coalition. Tons of college students of all races, lots of vaguely hipster looking middle aged people and blacks of all ages. And they were all going bananas. Obama’s speech itself was something of a letdown for many in the crowd. We had simply been too excited for too long, and after five or hours of standing. But there were those screaming “YES” after nearly every line, and plenty of people crying. I, for one, was mostly silent and let the moment wash over me. As lame and cheezy as this sounds, being in Grant Park is something that I’ll be talking about to anyone that wants to hear it – and even those who don’t – for as long as I’m alive. How many people can say that they saw history? I certainly can.

I’m too nervous and excited to write much. That and I’ll be leaving for Grant Park soon. But Jamelle Bouie has promised a “blogathon.” So, please check it out. You can wait till tonight to see John King playing with his super-map

Yeah, I’m going to be in Grant Park tomorrow night.

The last time I was at a communal celebration was in Vienna for the Euro Cup final. That morning, my friends and I decided, somewhat randomly, to root for Spain over Germany. By the afternoon, we were decked out in Spanish flags and scarves. We painted our faces red and yellow and were singing songs with the drunken, Spanish fans. We watched the game on a huge TV, screaming and dancing for 90 minutes. After Spain won, we continued the dancing and singing in the official fan zone, shimmied our way to Stephansplautz, and after a burger-and-beer pitstop at McDonalds, continued singing and dancing well into the early morning hours. We were matching, if not surpassing, the median Spanish fan in revelry* And this was for a team that we had only luckily picked that morning.

Needless to say, I will be much more excited for the Obama rally. But my little story of Vienna should give you an idea for just how pumped I am.

*I should pass along an anecdote that really captures just how silly we were being that day. While we were pounding back .52 € beers on a street corner and yelling at German fans in their convertible party bus from Munich, a group of East Asian tourists asked to take a picture with us. They must have mistaken our drunken chants of “Alemania a pies!” and “Que Viva Espana!” for something that real Spanish people actually do.

Check out my predictions downblog.  I forsee a 338-200 Obama win in the electoral college. In fact, my map might look something like this:

That map is the one Karl Rove put out today. Somehow, this makes me less confident in my prediction. Props to Jonathan for the tip

James Heckman, a Nobel Lauereate whose reputation in the mainstream economics community is impeccable:

         I do not think it’s class warfare [Obama's economic policies], I think it’s empirical economics. The real issue is the empirical content of the supply side economics dogma. It’s pretty threadbare. The “real business cycle” theory is simply inconsistent with empirical evidence. That does not prevent it from being taught as gospel to students (it’s really gospel not empirical evidence). I would first and foremost talk to Ray Fair (Yale) and Mark Watson (Princeton) about the evidence for the supply side model. What is ironic is that those who preach supply side practice a crude version of Keynesian economics that ignores all of those incentive effects claimed to be so important by the supply side theorists. The real question apart from the current turmoil is the longer run. Denying the value of investment in knowledge;in infrastructure;in basic science and education at all levels has been and will continue to be harmful to our long run health. In my mind Obama’s eyes are fixed more on things that will improve the US economy in the next century. The basic data on the current crisis is still being revealed, but it’s clear that the absence of serious regulatory oversight contributed mightily to the current problems. It’s not class warfare; its about a future-oriented society.

Both Ned and Jamelle have posted their electoral college maps, and Jamelle memed me, so here it is:

HHere’s my thinking in having Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina swing red. I don’t have confidence in the Democrats’ ability to get turnout in red states (except those that are going through a rapid and large scale demographic-political change like Virginia). Until proven otherwise, the GOP is really good at getting people in red states to vote for them. I think Missouri could easily go Obama’s way, but I think it’s more likely that McCain wins by a real squeaker, like thousands if not hundreds of votes*. I also think Florida could tighten up and be really close, and I was even tempted to predict McCain victory there as well. And as far as Montana and North Dakota go, if you look at 538, McCain has fairly solid leads in both of them, but five points in Montana or North Dakota are a whole lot different than five points in Ohio or Missouri, so Obama could surprise me. 

*Also, if I put Missouri down for Obama, then Jamelle and I would have the exact same map, and that wouldn’t be much fun

Mike Meginnis finds the logical endpoint of McCain’s absurd “Name + the + Occupation” strategy.

Interestingly enough, Bartelby has a rich history of endorsing political projects. Except they tend to be on the radical leftist side of things. In fact, he’s something of a postmodern leftist radical who palls around with terrorists.

Fuck

Only an Obama victory combined with a total thrashing of Minnesota next week will make me feel better.

Oh, and by the way, I’m actually pretty that Charles Fried endorsed Obama. Sure, he’sstill quite the conservative and was the Solicitor General for Reagan, but as evidenced by his bloggingheads appearence with Joshua Cohen and hi high reputation in the academic community, the man is a serious scholar and intellectual before being a political hack. It certainly means something that he’s coming out for Obama. I would like to think that the “flight to quality” of ones side inteligentsia would mean something to a movement, but with Sarah Palin “going rogue” and laying the groundwork for a 2012 run, I think we can be sure that the conservative movement’s divisive populism, fear of policy subtance, and total nihilism when it comes to governance will continue. And although I think it’s a strategy that will lead to them losing more in the short term, it’s hardly good for American politics to have one side whose base and party leadership just doesn’t care about quality or governing ability. Politics are cyclical, and the Palinauts will have some sort of power soon, and it won’t be pretty. 

Also, when will we see the mainstream media pointing to the defections from McCain by moderate Republicans as a sign of the party’s fading relevance and hijacking by radicals. This, of course, is the popular narrative for explaining the Democratic decline from the early 70s through the 80s. Because the Democrats were too socially liberal and hated our veterans (or something like that), all these white union workers abandoned the party that they had always been tied to. So, shouldn’t we be hearing about white collar workers whose capital gains taxes are going to shoot up and support free trade not voting GOP (and the flight of the moderate leadership) as a sign that the GOP has been taken over by socially conservative, fiscally insolvent, hawkish radicals? I know that this a common refrain of, say, Andrew Sullivan, but when will it congeal to the standard narrative? I feel like the Bush administration’s obvious incompetence is the culprit. For the past eight years, it was too easy to just say “oh, well, Bush is an idiot, so no wonder the GOP is so screwed up.” But when they realize that non-idiots (Steve Schmidt, Bill Kristol) are behind a systemic degradation of the party, hopefully the narrative will change accordingly.

Another note on conservative intellectuals endorsing Obama. In a perfect world, Gary Becker would be next, but he seems to be pretty far in the tank.

I imagine that many liberals, tired of the stupid Edwards haircut story and of personal stories in general, will try to argue that Palin’s mindblowing expenditure on clothing and accessories (some $150,000), all paid for by the RNC, don’t really matter. People, and politicians, should be able to look as nice as they want and this distracts us from the real issues. There are, however, two points that suggest this story is, in some way, important.

1. The press is obligated to blow up over this. The Politico and other news organizations crafted an entire narrative out of John Edwards’ $400 haircut. This campaign expense, which amounted to 2.7 percent of that for the Palins, was used to push a line on Edwards that he was vain and hypocritical. So I expect the same news organizations to constantly imply that Palin is 375 times more vain than Edwards, and 375 times more hypocritical for presenting herself as an avatar of middle America , while allowing the RNC to spend more than three times the median income of an average American to present herself on TV and in public appearences. 

2. This looks like corruption to me. Or at least sleaziness. If a rich conservative donor were to directly purchase, say, $75,062.63 worth of stuff from Neiman Marcus and $49,425.74 from Saks and give it Palin, it would be clearly illegal. Instead, we have a collection of rich donors giving money to the RNC and the RNC buying all this stuff for Palin. Now, all of these expenses have been reported and they can’t be traced back to any individual, so it’s not like there’s a possibility of Palin distributing favors to particular clothing-benefactors. What bothers me is that we have a Vice Presidential candidate spending fucking insane amounts of money on personal fineries for her and her entire family with political contributions!

I shouldn’t have to explain why this is wrong, she and the RNC should have to explain why it’s OK. Surely, she had clothes in Alaska? She made public appearences there, I imagine. Unless, of course, the people of Alaska don’t deserve to see her at her best. But I doubt she’ll want to say that.

Sure, women need to do more to look publicly presentable in public than men. So I understand if a female candidate gets her hair done everyday and spend more money on clothes. These expenses can even come from the campaign. But is anyone going to seriously argue that there isn’t the least bit of impropriety in spending at least $4,902.45 for Todd Palin’s clothing? The number is simply too high to be reasonable or justifiable. Did Hillary Clinton ever expense this much to her campaign. Well, she didn’t have to, because of her considerable personal wealth, but I think we can all agree that there’s a reasonable amount of money that could be spent on Palin’s appearence, and that $150,00 isn’t it.

3. It will be fun seeing conservatives trying to justify these expenditures. One can make a consistent argument that $400 on a haircut is trivial, but $150,000 is not. One, however, can’t make the argument that the former matters while the latter is just the liberal press trying to smear a small-town American for trying to impress the coastal elite.  

I should add that, obviously, there are much, much better reasons to vote against McCain-Palin than how much campaign money is spent on her clothes. But we deal with the media-driven narratives and priorities we have, not those we wish we had.

After Sarah Palin’s infamous RNC speech, there was some debate over what she meant when she said “we tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.” There was the obvious reference to Obama’s ‘bitter’ comments, but I read the remark as some straight-up Bay Area hate. And I I still do. She could have referenced bittergate without implying scorn for a large, American city.

Palin’s comments, of course, fit into a larger pattern where Republicans are allowed to say that entire densly populated swaths of the country simply don’t count. You’ll never hear Democratic candidates refer to any state in a negative way in their stump speeches. You’ll never hear a Democrat say that having a conservative Senator and a conversative governor is “what they call balancing the ticket in Arizona.” You won’t hear Democrats talk about “east-coast elites” or single out any geographic area for Two Minutes Hate.

Palin, however, has just continued her bashing of everwhere in America that isn’t South of DC, West of the Rockies and North of the Ohio:

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one.

Why is it acceptable for a Vice Presidential candidate to accuse parts of the county or not having America’s best interests at heart? Can you imagine the uproar if Obama implied something similar about, say, Oklahoma or South Carolina or Indiana? The Right (and much of the centrist media) would be in a total uproar. But Sarah Palin can go on her merry way, accusing Californians as the Wash-Bos-NYC region of hating America. It’s really sickening.

My dad and I have long joked that when the Republican party runs out of things to propose, they will always go back to the old standbye – cutting taxes on capital (or just on rich people). Even when a demand-side stimulus is needed and when just about all stock sales would constitute losses (not to mention that middle class people who have equity shares in their 401(k)’s don’t realize capital gains), the McCain campaign proposes that we cut capital gains taxes. This doesn’t make sense, if you’re thinking about a proper response to a credit crunch and a slackening economy. But if you profess to not know about economics and have decided to sell yourself out to the policy nihilists who call themselves supply siders, then this move makes perfect sense. 

At the same time, the Bush administration has decided to buy voting shares in troubled banks. One group of conservatives is responding pragmatically to conditions on the ground, while the other one is in fairly land. The McCain campaign simply isn’t a serious group of people who care about what the best policies are to address our economic troubles. I think the media (and all commentators) should stop treating them as such.

For better or for worse, my life only barely overlapped with the Cold War. That means I was never able to experience Republicans red-baiting their political opponents as a last-ditch attempt to discredit popular politicians and policies. Well, thanks to Obama’s commanding lead in the polls and the lack of a credible message on the economy, it looks like everyone is going in for the Hail Mary pass of making Obama out to be some sort of commie radical. And although Andy “More Maoist than Stalinist” McCarthy appeared to take the crown for anti-Obama nuttitness, I think the guys at Powerline - and more specifically, Jack Cashill - take the cake. What ridiculous claim did they make, you ask.

Wait for it.

That Bill Ayers ghostwrote Dreams from my Fathers. The evidence is that we have none of Obama’s past writing besides an unsigned note from the Harvard Law Review and two poems. And because Obama is a communist-terrorist until proven innocent, we must then assume that someone else wrote his first memoir. Also, because Ayers’ authorial voice intrudes on the narrative, and Obama’s doesn’t, it must mean that Obama wrote both.

But the biggest humdinger in this conspiratorial rant is a claim about how Obama and Ayers come from the same background, “both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since.” Because growing up with a lower income, young, single mom in Hawaii and growing up the son of the CEO of Commonwealth Edison is totally the same thing. Also, because they were both community organizers and discuss “rage,” it must have been Ayers who was able to “[crawl]inside Obama’s head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams’ author calls a “rage at the white world [that] needed no object.” (Nevermind that Obama discusses the lack of acceptance by whites of black men while Ayers talks about structural and political injustices committed by whites). Also, both men use the word “audacity” and deploy nautical metaphors. So, clearly, they must the same person.

Seriously, Cashill makes anti-Stratfordians and Gavin Menzies look like serious, sober scholars.

Ezra Klein passes along some chatter from the McCain campaign that, in their effort to convince America that Obama is a black liberationist-islamo-terrorist, is going to tie him to Ali Abunimah. Now, who is Mr. Abunimah? Well, he has a scary sounding Arab name, which is all you have to know from the perspective of the GOP and the McCain campaign. But he’s actually a journalist and activist based in Chicago who publishes The Electronic Intifada, an internet publication intended to provide “a needed supplement to mainstream commercial media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” As you can imagine Abunimah holds views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict well outside the American political mainstream. His website primarily focuses on Israeli abuses of Palestinians, as well as rather harsh coverage of Israel’s actions in the 2006 Summer War with Lebanon. In a March 2007 article, Abunimah summed up his relationship with Obama:

Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker. In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. 

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, “Keep up the good work!”

But Obama’s gradual shift into the AIPAC camp had begun as early as 2002 as he planned his move from small time Illinois politics to the national scene. In 2003, Forward reported on how he had “been courting the pro-Israel constituency.” He co-sponsored an amendment to the Illinois Pension Code allowing the state of Illinois to lend money to the Israeli government. Among his early backers was Penny Pritzker — now his national campaign finance chair — scion of the liberal but staunchly Zionist family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. (The Hyatt Regency hotel on Mount Scopus was built on land forcibly expropriated from Palestinian owners after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967). He has also appointed several prominent pro-Israel advisors.

Basically, Abunimah’s story is similar to that of Rashid Khalidi – the former U Chicago (now Yale Columbia) professor who ran in the same social circles as Obama. Both men perceived Obama, before his senatorial election and presidential run, as being more sympathetic to Palestinian concerns (but by no means anti-Zionist) than your average American politican. Since Obama has moderated his views towards the center and has expressed very strong, unqualified support for Israel, both men have become disillusioned with him.

The GOP and their willing stenographers in the blogosphere and print media would have you think that Obama’s moves in the past four years indicate that he isn’t a “true” friend of Israel, and that deep down, Osama Obama really does want Jews to be driven into the sea, or something like that. But anyone who thinks that Obama’s policy towards Israel will seriously deviate from the bipartisan tradition of essentially unlimited aid and guaranteed diplomatic support (along with sotto voce denouncements of settlement construction) is kidding themselves. There are structural reasons why every president has behaved this way, and they won’t be altered by an Obama win.

I should also note that the very fact I had to dig up some biographical information on a relatively obscure Palestinian activist to anticipate the McCain campaign’s last-second Arab-baiting of Obama is incredibly depressing. I really don’t like writing, reading or thinking about the campaign anymore. In the past week, the McCain campaign declared that they were going to hammer on Ayers/Rezko/Wright/Khalidi/Abunimah while the Obama campaign started a new push on promoting their health care plan. That just about encapsulates how intelletually and morally bankrupt the McCain campaign has become, and why I don’t really feel like engaging with their bullshit.

There’s an assumption held by many liberal pundits that because economic times are so bad, that the vast majority of the undecided voter pool won’t be intersted in McCain’s substance-free racialized attacks on Obama’s “associations.” I would like to believe that this is true, and looking at Obama’s continued strong standing in the polls and the fact that it’s the well-off that vote on cultural matters, this may be well placed optimism. But this is kinda weird, considering the general connection between economic anxiety/decline and racial animus.

Benjamin Friedman wrote the classic The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth which explored how economic decline was often connected with increased fear of outsiders, with the subsequent scapegoating. Of course, we’ve seen the GOP attempt to scapegoat minorities and poor people for the economic crisis by their lame attempts to blame the CRA, but this particular explanation doesn’t seem to have caught on outside of Townhall.com. If America is willing to elect “Barack Obama” in a time of economic crisis, when generally scapegoating and fear of the other is the order of the day, I’ll be incredibly happy. Just, note, however, how exceptional it would be.

OK, I’ll be upfront. I didn’t watch the entire debate, and I slept for about 20 minutes. I found it incredibly boring, and with the exception of a few crazy things McCain said, totally unenlightening. The most exciting part for me was seeing the gaggle of Koreans who live in my dorm boo Obama for portraying Korean manufacturing as a threat to the American worker, and cheering McCain when he said that South Koreans are, on average, three inches taller than their North Korean counterparts. But here were the three moments that made me think that McCain isn’t just a flawed politician with bad ideas, but someone who has a very basic disconnect with the issues the country faces or who just doesn’t care.

1. In the opening section on the economy, and then on government spending, McCain continuously harped on 18 billion dollars of earmarks. Sure, earmarks probably aren’t the best way to spend money (even if they don’t actually increase the budget, they merely redirect other appropriations), but 18 billion dollars pales in comparison to the cost of the Iraq war (approaching 1 trillion dollars), pales in comparison to the 600 300 billion or so in revenue loss that McCain’s tax cuts for the rich would lead to. It’s chump change compared to the 700 billion we’ll have to spend initially on the bail out. The point is, you can do all you want about earmarks and save a small amount of money and prevent some petty corruption. If McCain actually claimed to care about federal spending, he wouldn’t be proposing massive tax cuts, he’d think about military spending in a more holistic way (more on that later) and would actually say something about entitlement reform.

But McCain seems to lack the ability to think about policy in a systemic, big picture way. He instead just sees greed and corruption among those Congressmen who request earmarks. He thinks that if we “know their names” and he whips out his great veto pen, spending will miraculously fall. We merely have to be virtuous. Too bad that government spending is nearly all entitlements and defense. Entitlement spending is mandated by Congress, and defense spending isn’t going to be cut under a McCain administration. So all he can to is pontificate about earmarks, while ignoring the herd of elephants in the room.

2.The second bizarre thing McCain said was proposing a “spending freeze” on all non-discretionary, non defense and non veterans spending. So either McCain is bullshitting (likely) or he’s actually proposing to freeze Pell Grants, Head Start, unemployment benefits and a whole host of government programs that have near universal support among the public. Obama should be pointing this out. Mark Schmitt has more on just how extreme a promise this is. 

The last bizarre thing McCain said was his impassioned rant about cost overruns in defense spending. Surely, this is a real problem that ought to be addressed, but really, a weapons program that is slated to cost 180 million and ends up costing 400 million isn’t that big a deal. Especially compared to the fixed cost of maintaining military bases all over the world, of staying in Iraq (once again, nearly a trillion dollars), or of getting these weapons systems in the first place. If I heard McCain said that we should cancel a weapons program (say, new submarines, drastically cutting back our F-35 and F-22 order), I might have been impressed. But because McCain can’t think about questions of government spending in a big picture way, and he can only focus on small, marginal instances of greed and incompetence, it would be incomprehensible for him to bring up defense spending that actually mattered. This approach would make sense for a senator who’s closely involved with the defense appropriation process, but a president has to set large-scale priorities, and that doesn’t mean mucking around in exactly how much a given weapons project is going over its initial estimate.

We all know that McCain’s ideas (confrontation in foreign affairs, league of democracies, tax cuts for the rich, throwing everyone into the individual market of health care etc etc etc ) are bad, but this debate showed that his very approach to politics and policy is fundamentally flawed and should disqualify him from being president.

There’s a reason that I’m much more interested in Northwestern’s 22-17 over Iowa, putting us at 5-0 for the first time since 1962. For all of Northwestern’s flaws – and they are numerous – they at least treat the game seriously, which is more than I can say about McCain*

*You should notice that I was able to go on a long, impassioned rant about John McCain’s lack or seriousness and fundamental personality flaws without mentioning Sarah Palin. 

I hardly want to spend all day criticizing Adam Serwer’s Hip-Hop and politics piece, but there’s one assertion that is just glaringly incorrect: that Lil Wayne is “cheerfully apolitical.” The guy sure is cheerful, except for the few rather morbid and glum tracks that pepper TC3, but he’s clearfully one of the most profound political commentators of this, or any, time. Just read, and prepare to be enlightened:

Barack, I guess, but I can’t make a real opinion. I ain’t watching no debates. I just want my people to understand that Hillary and Barack are not running for president–they running to be able to run for president. There’s a Republican party, too–we ain’t about to win, fool! A woman or a black man versus an old white dude? Fcuk no! They gonna be like, This black-ass nigga trying to come in my Oval Office? Fcuuuuuk no.The world about to end in 2012 anyway. ‘Cause the Mayans made calendars, and they stop at 2012. I got encyclopedias on the bus. The world is gonna end as we know it. You can see it already. A planet doesn’t exist: There’s no more Pluto. Planes are flying into buildings–and not just the Twin Towers, but dudes who play baseball are flying planes into buildings. Mosquitoes bite you and you die. And a black man and a woman are running for president!

The only other political commentary that can even compare is DMX’s befuddled reaction to the fact that a man named “Barack Obama” was even running for president.

Palin’s speech was a preview of her role as culture war attack dog. Her purpose will be to energize the base and increase conservative enthusiasm for the ticket. McCain, however, seems like he’s going to be reaching out to moderates and undecideds. His speech sounded like one from nominee of the out of power party. And that’s the problem – McCain’s party has been in power, in various forms, since 1994.

When he’s running against Congress, he can say he’s running against Reid and Pelosi, but he’s really running against every GOP congress from 1998 onwards, and against the Bush presidency. He showed deep ambivalence about the Bush presidency, but this ambivalence is going to be zeroed in on by the Obama campaign. The contrary video clips, quotes and policy stances are simply too numerous. If there is one area of the campaign where the Obama organization is amazingly well prepared, it’s on hammering home the point that McCain is more of Bush. This has been the argument since McCain locked up the nomination – and the McCain campaign only started running against Bush and the current GOP, in earnest, rather recently. 

One of the weird things about the Palin speech was that it was such a jarring note of dissonance to the entire McCain message since 2000. Palin had nothing but contempt for her political opponents, and made no appeals to patriotism or a common American identity. One or two weeks out, however, Palin will basically be forgotten. She is not on top of the ticket, her vision and personality aren’t the core of the campaign: McCain’s is. And that’s going to be a huge problem: the grassroots of the party loves Palin, and they want to run a Bush 04-style campaign, where they turn out the base and smear the other side as America-hating snobs. McCain, if his speech is any indication, doesn’t really feel comfortable with that type of campaign.

But the reasons why a base-turnout campaign won’t work are the same as the reasons why McCain’s centrist-seeming maverick campaign won’t work. The Republican brand is fundamentally unpopular, and it’s not because the GOP strayed from McCain (ie, corruption) but because they are fundamentally out of step with most Americans on issues of national defense and the economy. Sure, McCain was the only Republican candidate that could win, but after hearing four days of the GOP and the McCain campaign making their best case to the electorate, it doesn’t look like he’ll be able to pull it off.

Quick question: How long after Obama wins in November until the Palin 2012 campaign starts?

Let’s imagine that, in a parallel universe, after Sarah Palin learned that the child she was carrying would have Down Syndrome, she got an abortion. She didn’t tell anyone, except her husband and her doctor. Butshe was still nominated as the GOP’s vice presidential candidate, and she maintained her pro-life stance.

A nurse working at the clinic where Palin got the abortion comes across her file. What should she do? And if she did publicize Palin’s abortion (not necessarily personally, but perhaps by leaking it to a reporter) would you criticize her? What would NARAL, Planned Parenthood and NOW say? What would feminist bloggers say? Evangelicals? Columnists? The general public?

Fire Away.