A Bright Red (updated: The Case for Federal Intervention)

To what extent do White America's voting patterns in the Presidential election of 2008 inform us about racism in America?

To what extent is a local population's diminished support for Barack Obama in 2008 compared to the level of support for John Kerry in 2004 indicative of racism? What other factors might cause a population to be more enthusiastic for Kerry in '04 than Obama in '08?

538 has an interesting new map embedded in today's post about this subject.

This map, which was spread around the internet just after election day, compares how different counties voted in '08 compared to '04.



This map, however, subtracts African Americans to show how non-blacks voted by county in '08 compared to '04.


That's a much more nuanced depiction of voting pattern.

Look at the Old Confederacy in both maps.

Swish all this around in your mouth a little while as you think about where the most strident opposition to President Obama is coming from and as you consider New Orleans' position within the state of Louisiana and Gulf South region.


Late update:

Let me cut to the chase.

When I was thinking about these maps, and often when I consider the resources required to justly and equitably rebuild this city and make it sustainable over the medium long term, I have an internal debate about the extent that federal intervention will be required.

Not just in terms of money allocated, but in terms of direct imposition of policy on states where ultraconservative state leaders further isolate poor communities from critical resources in the name of false fiscal responsibility. Sort of like Louisiana right now...

I'd like to open that up to discussion.

Is the idea of federal receivership of Orleans Parish the most disgusting thing you've ever heard? Is it a necessary evil?

Ringing In The New Era

A funny juxtaposition to think about as I collect myself for later analysis:

Last night I watched the returns with my "youthy" peers at One Eyed Jacks. DJ Soul Sister threw a giant victory party and it was a lot of fun.

Anyway, Soul Sister was properly drunk well before Ohio got called so you can try to imagine how things were by the time the networks had made the call.

While waiting for Obama to take the stage for his victory speech, she invited a couple of people on stage to speak. After that, she just threw her hands in the air and invited anybody who wanted to on stage to say what they were feeling, which was something awesomely normal to do on election night in the world's greatest democracy. DJ SS kept on handing me free drink tickets so I wasn't too far behind her in the lost inhibitions department and decided that I had something super important to say. I'll attempt to recreate what I said:

"I feel very privileged to be part of this moment and to be part of this movement. Louisiana didn't go our way tonight but we all got together to vote in Orleans Parish to change the leadership of this country. We need to recreate that here. In 2010 we have to reunite once more to change the leadership of this city when we get to elect a new mayor. I hope all of you will be part of that."

Anyway, I thought that was an important thing to say. I felt like it was a good idea to highlight the change we still seek at the local level. I'm sure it wasn't as stated as clearly as in my recollection of the moment but let's just pretend that I was confident, eloquent, and direct. Also let's pretend I was 6'3'' with rippling biceps and triceps.

My comments were pretty well received from my standpoint and I hopped off stage.

Then what my friends and I have nicknamed a "wooo girl" (think drunk co-ed at a tailgate party) got up to deliver her thoughts. Again, to paraphrase:

"I'm just so happy that Barack is President and that we won the election and beat John McCain. I'm super excited. Ohmygod I love him."

She may have delivered a more stirring sentence or two at the beginning there but the last line, especially her delivery, just cracked me up.

And it provided me something to chew on today as I reflect on where our country is going and where our progressive movement is going.

Election Recap

The Presidency

We won the big one. I'll analyze this more later but for now I'm thinking about the difference between Terry McAuliffe and Howard Dean and the difference between Ken Mehlman and Mike Duncan.

The Senate

Democrats didn't fare quite as well as some anticipated.

As expected, Democrats won in New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado, and Virginia. Kay Hagen defeated Elizabeth Dole pretty handily in North Carolina, which is very nice to see after Dole's smear ads, my pick for worst of the whole cycle. In Louisiana, Mary Landrieu cleared John Kennedy's low hurdle, winning by the largest margin of her Senate career.

That's it though.

Gordon Smith is leading Jeff Merkely in Oregon by two percentage points with 25% of the precincts still uncounted. Merkely had surged in the polls over the last few weeks, so it is surprising to see that this seat may not flip. My personal opinion is that Democrats made a mistake in their primary. I was a Steve Novick supporter:




In Minnesota, a late-breaking funnel scheme scandal embroiling incumbent Republican Norm Coleman should have been enough to allow Al Franken to sneak by, but perhaps not. Franken is down by a few hundred votes and a recount is imminent.

Alaska just supplanted Oklahoma in my brain's official list of most ridiculously backward states in America because it appears they're poised to reelect convicted felon Ted Stevens to the Senate over Anchorage Mayor Marc Begich, who was a very solid challenger. Alaska also reelected Congressman Don Young, under investigation for bribery. New Orleans holds a special place in its landfills for Don Young, recall his empathy after Katrina. John McCain proposed "charitable pork" which called on lawmakers to forgo pet projects to help fund aid for Katrina victims. Young's response: "They can kiss my ear!" That was weeks after the storm, not years after our local leadership squandered national goodwill.

Bruce Lunsford fell tantalizingly short of his bid to knock off Mitch McConnell in Kentucky but Musgrove, Rice, Kleeb, and Noriega failed to break through in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas, respectively.

Democrats may have a chance to push in Georgia, which may or may not be headed to a runoff. Saxby Chambliss, who's not a good guy, is close to making it without one but votes are still being counted.

The House

Democrats picked up at least 17 seats but several races have not been called. Locally, foolish voters failed to reelect Don Cazayoux from the 6th District, who would have been a great asset for our state in a Democratic Congress. That's one of the bigger disappointments of the evening.

Other

Initiatives to allow medical marijuana in Michigan and to decriminalize it in Massachusetts passed by resounding margins larger than the proportion of citizens voting for Obama. I'd like to see us take this up at the Parish level. It's not scary, it's a political winner.

In what could be the low point of the election, California's proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage is very close to passage. I'm hoping against hope.


Louisiana

This state is so far behind, it's really really behind. We emerged with some really stupid self-inflicted wounds in the House, I'm still shaking my head about Cazayoux in the 6th. That Jim Harlan couldn't crack 35% in the 1st Congressional district is depressing, though not entirely unexpected.

I'm surprised to see that New Orleans passed the master plan amendment. And happy.

Turnout in New Orleans was solid, close to 150,000 ballots were cast.

Congressman Jefferson is embarrassing and packs no clout. Hopefully he will be convicted and expelled so that we can try one more time to elect a credible representative.

We have a new District Attorney. I'm hopeful for stability in that office. We have to advocate for progressive reform of our criminal justice system.

-

Overall, it's a good day today.

HAVE YOU VOTED YET?

I have. It felt great. I voted for Barack Obama.


There was a tiny tiny line, I waited ten minutes.


On the national level, I've been checking on the twitter vote report for a snapshot.



TNR has a good rundown of some of the problem areas from around the country. I'll be keeping an eye on this.

Mostly I'll be biting my nails.


How was your vote in Louisiana today? How long did you wait?

Here's a dissatisfied customer from Jefferson Parish:

Unfortunately, I witnessed a voter denied the right to vote in Jefferson
Parish, Louisiana this morning. I explained the proper procedure to the
poll worker who refused to abide by easily understood state law
regarding provisional ballots.

I then reported this to Jefferson Parish election officials who verbally
instructed the poll worker on proper procedure. Unfortunately, by this
time the voter had left the polling location, precinct 31 in Jefferson
Parish.

This is a failure of the Jefferson Parish Clerk of Court, Jon
Gegenheimer, to properly execute his job. I plan to formally demand:

1. The removal of the poll workers of precinct 31 for any future
elections
2. A written procedure from Jon Gegenheimer on the proper training and
assessment of all Jefferson Parish poll workers.

Regards,

David Gereighty
(snip)
2nd Vice Chair Jefferson Parish Democratic Executive Committee
Treasurer, Louisiana Democratic State Central Committee

Anybody else voting in Jefferson Parish today? What does it look like?

We Monitor Our Own Elections

Check out this fascinating article by Simon Owens profiling the use of new media to monitor the vote.


Especially look at the Twitter Vote Report.



Pretty neat.

Add it to my rudimentary list of tools we can use to track voter suppression: The Last Hurdle

Let's Win This Thing

I'll soon be boarding a plane to return to New Orleans after a much appreciated trip to my home planet.

Here's what I got for the Prezzy:





The state I waffle on most often is Missouri, which I think is a coin flip. Georgia will be way closer than the polls have predicted and so will Mississippi and Louisiana, less than 4 points difference in each. Barack Obama will win with 53.4% of the vote in a pretty clear mandate.


For the Senate:

Democrats will flip seats in New Hampshire, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Virginia, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Alaska.

Georgia, the potential 60th seat, will see a runoff vote. It will be hotly contested.


For the House:

Democrats will pick up between 30 and 35 seats, a greater total than has generally been predicted.


In New Orleans:

Landrieu 55.4%
Kennedy 43.7%

Jefferson 51.3%
Moreno 45.2%

Harlan 49%
Scalise 49%

Toss Up!

If we do our part, we can pull of a surprise in Louisiana for Barack Obama!

A new poll has us within the margin of error.



I won't even look at that polls methodology because I don't care how inaccurate it might turn out to be. Just use it as inspiration and worry about it later.

Eff these Effigies

Beware the disturbing photograph attached to this post. I normally shy from displaying such images but people need to be confronted with this kind of garbage.

This morning, Andrew Sullivan passed along a disturbing email forwarded from a University of Kentucky staffer:

Dear Colleagues,

It is with profound sadness that I must report to you that an effigy of Obama was found hanging from a tree on campus this morning. It was taken down immediately, but the damage and hurt will linger for a long time. I literally feel sick to my stomach. There will be a statement from the President shortly, and we are also considering other expressions of outrage. In the meantime, please alert your staff and be prepared to counsel students, staff, and faculty of color, in particular, as needed.

But don't think that this disgusting behavior is limited to the whatever stereotypical conception of Kentucky race relations you might hold. A friend of an old travel buddy of mine from my days wandering Mediterranean Turkey went walking his dog this morning in Redondo Beach, California and encountered this stomach-turning scene, posting it to Flickr:

(I removed the picture from here because I couldn't stand to see it anymore, but you can click the flickr link to see it if you want.)

VOTE ON TUESDAY!

Update:

There have also been a lot of press for a Palin-doll hanging in the LA area, which prompted a Secret Service visit to that person's home. While the Palin effigy hanging is also grossly offensive, there is absolutely no comparison and to argue otherwise completely ignores history.

The Last Hurdle

With less than six days until we elect Barack Obama President, my greatest fear is not that the Democrats will find some way to lose.

It's that Republicans will find some way to steal.

I do not worry about last minute campaign ads or even a multi-platinum release from OBL. Barack Obama's support is solid enough to win the election without the somehow-still-undecideds right now. The movement turnout machine is enormous, organized, and motivated. John McCain's campaign does not boast significant enough ground game resources.

But when I see a West Virginia election official awkwardly explaining how it's normal for poorly calibrated voting machines to switch votes from Obama to Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin...



...I can't help but get a little nervous. At least West Virginia voting booths produce a paper trail.

Now do I actually think that this election will yield invalid results as a result of widespread voter suppression? No.

But I do think it's the most important thing to monitor over the next six days.

Take a camera into the voting booth with you. Watch your neighborhoods for misleading fliers that lie about polling locations or poll times. Monitor your phone lines for misleading robo-calls.

If you sense something fishy, speak up. Loudly.

Just in case this thing is much closer than anticipated and malfunctions swing the election, it will prove helpful to have instances of suppression already collected.

Check out:

Source Watch

Brad Blog (the must-read for voting machine malfunction stories)

Voter Suppression Wiki

Video the Vote

In Louisiana, the biggest threat to a fair vote appears to be registration purges by Republican Secretary of State Jay Dardenne. See the T-P today. Remember, if you've been purged or know someone that has been purged - you have the right to fill out a provisional ballot. Do not be turned away if you believe you are registered.

Hateful Rays-Baiting By McCain Camp at PA Stop

This morning I drove to Bensalem, Pennsylvania, just outside Philly, to check out a John McCain event being held at the TC Millwork facility. TC Millwork manufactures fixtures and whatnot for casinos, health care facilities, and other retailers.

I had wanted to check out for myself some of this hatefulness characterizing many McCain campaign events over the last ten days or so.

But aside from a couple of refrains of "communist" or "socialist," McCain supporters in Bensalem were largely peaceful. No overly offensive anti-Obama tee shirts or buttons. The event was tightly controlled and occurred very early in the morning.

I was disappointed that I had schlepped all the way to Bensalem with a camera only to be put back to sleep by the relaxed crowd and the boring speech but trust me when I say how reassuring it was not to have had to witness a bunch of spiteful human caricatures flying off the handle.

Before the speeches began, I was chatting with some members of the local press gaggle who were wondering about just how short the notice was before this morning's rally. The reason was that the event drew no more than 1000 people. The McCain camp has gotten used to smaller crowds in comparison to Obama's events but the advance team seemed to have anticipated a more substantial turnout - a much larger area was cordoned off in the facility than ended up being necessary.

The other thing I noticed about the crowd was how familiar everybody seemed to be with other attendees. Now that's not an observation of the friendliness and camaraderie of McCain supporters - I'm saying that people knew each other, literally. The crowd seemed to be made up of a lot of regular GOP volunteers, not the larger Bucks County population. Also the crowd was disproportionately over the age of - they were freakin' old. There were some nuclear families there too but overwhelmingly, it was the early-bird.

Remember, it's not as if this event was held in Center City Philadelphia, where Obama is wildly popular. This was a campaign rally in the traditionally conservative suburb of Bucks County. Republicans have long relied on the Philadelphia suburbs to offset the liberal voting power of the city proper. But in 2000 and 2004, Bucks rejected George Bush and so did Pennsylvania at-large. In 2006, Bucks flipped the 8th Congressional district by electing Patrick Murphy, the first Democrat to represent the district since 1993.

Apparently, signals coming from the McCain campaign indicate a Pennsylvania-centered strategy over the next few weeks. Without a viable means of keeping up with Obama's message and campaign machine, the McCain camp seems to be realizing that there is no way they can win Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc. Without flipping a big electoral prize like Pennsylvania, McCain can't win the election. He simply does not have the money, time, or campaign competence to expect to keep all the red states that Obama currently leads in the polls - even if you take Florida and Ohio out of the equation.

To win Pennsylvania, which voted with the Democratic nominee in both 2000 and 2004, McCain will have to reverse the last fifteen years of GOP atrophy and Democratic gain in the Philadelphia suburbs. Not to mention the 8-15 point lead Obama has in the polls in Pennsylvania. He has two weeks to do it and he can't do it without boosting his popularity in Bucks County. And I don't think he can boost his popularity in Bucks County unless he can figure out a way to quintuple the number of people willing to attend his rallies there.

But wait -

John McCain is an experienced candidate and has become increasingly well-versed in the politics of division and deceit. He played the Rays card at today's event in the Philly burbs.

Here's what he said:

I heard that Senator Obama was showing some love to the Rays down in Tampa Bay yesterday. Now, I'm not dumb enough to get mixed up in a World Series between swing states, but I think I may have detected a little pattern with Senator Obama. It's pretty simple really. When he's campaigning in Philadelphia, he roots for the Phillies, and when he's campaigning in Tampa Bay, he shows love to the Rays.

That's the most blatant form of Rays-baiting imaginable. McCain is hinging his campaign on Pennsylvania which means he needs to reverse course in the Philly area. So what does he do? He questions Barack Obama's credentials as a Phillies fan.

Brilliant strategy.

McCain's advisers certainly know how important the World Series is for Philadelphia and have likely encouraged McCain to do whatever it takes to impugn Senator Obama on that issue.

But it's wrong!

Barack Obama has maintained that since his hometown White Sox were eliminated, he'd be rooting for those Fightin' Philadelphia Phillies. And good for him. It's the correct policy. Any objective observer that has studied the history of the game and the current baseball climate knows that the Phillies are the right team for the right time.

Yesterday, after the Tampa Rays won their first ever AL pennant, Barack Obama was introduced at an event by rookie pitcher David Price and some other members of the local nine. Obama politely congratulated them on their success, saying this:

"I have said from the beginning that I am a unity candidate, bringing people together," Obama said. "So when you see a White Sox fan showing love to the Rays, and the Rays showing some love back, you know we're onto something right here."

In no way did Barack Obama flip-flop on his endorsement of the Phillies. There is nothing wrong with the Tampa Rays. They have a lot of likable players, have a compelling worst-to-first story, and Barack Obama has no reason not to appreciate their efforts. But let us be clear: Barack Obama is pulling for the Phils!

He first endorsed the Phillies on October 12th. He did so AGAIN over the weekend - to an enemy Florida radio show. So what kind of campaign is John McCain running?

McCain, while accurately quoting Obama, makes an absolutely inappropriate inference about switched loyalties. The derision in his voice was palpable - it was scary.

McCain's decision to Rays-bait a tense Philadelphia shows what kind of man he is. McCain himself does not have the courage to pick a World Series team of his own but he has no problem inciting a crowd to - we're talking Philly sports fans here - violence.

It was a shameful display by a man once destined to be remembered as honorable. My how times have changed.

McCain Campaign Inspires Unspeakable

From Fayetteville, North Carolina:

Photographer Joe Eddins and I headed over to the closest one and found a steady line of voters hoping to cast ballots early. Most seemed to be Obama supporters and several had come from the rally. Nearly all the voters were black.

Also at the polling site was a group of loud and angry protesters who shouted and mocked the voters as they walked in. Nearly all were white.

Country First.

I'd be great if we had a Dept. of Justice.

via Yglesias, Boyd

Weekend Notes

- The T-P picks up on Blakely's sad hypocrisy. While criticizing his staff's inability to function in his absence, he continues to maintain a hectic consultant schedule after accepting a new gig in faraway Dubai. (First reported guess where)

-From the no duh dept: White candidates have benefited from the disproportionate injustice perpetrated on African Americans by governmental response to Katrina.

What annoys me about the whole electoral situation is that you'd never know there's even a 50-50 black-white split. You'd think African Americans made up just 10-30 percent of the population given how conservative our excuse for political discourse tends to be.

The hopeful element is that there is ample room for coalition building between African Americans and progressive whites. African Americans politicians are going to need to break away from traditional over-reliance on the vertical BOLDs and COUPs of the world to mimic the horizontal Obama coalition on the municipal level. White progressives need to stop simply working to deconstruct old corrupt machines that tend to divide us on racial loyalties rather than political ideology.

That's going to take a lot of time and effort to accomplish given the power of ultra-conservative and supremacist interests in the greater region.

- Colin Powell won't admit that the Iraq War was a mistake but did have the common sense to recognize the best way not to make that non-mistake again by endorsing Barack Obama. Forget the Meet the Press appearance because his mini session with the press gaggle is a much more stirring and emotional explanation of his decision:





Powell specifically references the downright scary sentiments of Congresswoman Bachman from Minnesota, which left Chris Mathews largely speechless for the first time in his life:




Also see John McCain lie through his teeth in defense of his indefensible robo-calls, a good follow-up to General Powell's repudiation of the narrow-minded 21st Century GOP:





Finally, McCain's recent equation of Barack Obama's proposed middle class tax cuts to "welfare" is absolutely revolting. As someone that has a cursory knowledge of the history of post WWII political communication in the US, there is no doubt in my mind that this construction is solely designed to incite racist emotion. Does anyone disagree with that? Admittedly, my educational interests might make my reaction to this latest BS more emotional than most. Are other people feeling dizzy from this?


UPDATE:

Oh and Lolis Eric Elie tries to trade Ray Nagin's expiring contract and finds there are no takers.

Women For McCain

I mean, "health of the mother?"
Vote McCain: The Mom Killer Ticket

Katie Halper is a badass.

For Better or Worse, It's Almost Entirely About Looks

The debates are about how the candidates interact with each other and how they try to relate with the viewing audience. What people saw was a cool customer that seems to try to explain his positions and an angry old man who had to grip on to a Sharpie because his hands shake if left to their own devices.

McCain lost every debate badly because visual perception and interpretation is what determines the winner or loser - not the substance. McCain looked contemptuous and angry while also appearing not to believe some of the words coming out of his own mouth. Every joke he attempted to make, every snicker he tried to elicit fell flat. Whether it's his robotic hand gestures, his insincerity, his refusal to make eye contact in the first debate, his aimless wandering of the set during the second debate, or his palpable disrespect for an opponent largely attempting to be agreeable, John McCain lost support in all three debates even though people try to argue about "points."

These were the visual cues the public perceived.
Visual cues have a greater impact than the verbalized answers. John McCain looks angry, erratic, out-of-touch, and insincere.

He looks old as hell and he acts old as hell.

Forget leading a nation, I don't feel comfortable with John McCain behind the wheel of a Buick.

I hope you watch the whole thing. It recalls some of his best from the early primary season.

On Republicans Running Against Obama in Louisiana

Jeffrey makes some good points about state Republicans running against Obama in their campaigns against local Democrats that have mostly never met Barack Obama or don't vote anything like him. (Including a the tasteless invocation of Reverend Wright in a political ad against the conservative Democrat Jim Harlan)

Jeffrey is right not to assume that this is a 'losing strategy' though I'm not sure which liberals are making that argument.

He is also right to assume that the identical and simultaneous strategies of Steve the Sleaze and the Neely Weather vane reflect some degree of coordination.

It is very possible that Scalise and Kennedy will see their electoral prospects improve based on this guilt by peripheral association smear campaign.

But this is unmistakably a desperate strategy. The Kennedy campaign is in awful shape and Scalise is looking in the rear view mirror at the fast-approaching and well-financed Jim Harlan. They don't have positive messages. They don't want to defend their past positions. They don't want to discuss the state of the nation. They don't want to debate the merits of their current policy positions. If they attempt to engage their opponents on any of these substantive things, the best they can hope for is a draw - as good as a loss given the momentum in each of the respective campaigns.

With nothing to run on and plenty to run from, the Kennedy and Scalise campaigns are forced to dig deeper and deeper into the depths of their sleazy souls in order to find mud sticky enough to stay on the minds of voters when they go to the polls.

Maybe attaching their opponent to Obama will work and maybe it won't.
Neither the Scalise and Kennedy campaigns know either.

The only calculation they've made is that they can't afford not to try it.

More Philly

This Ben Smith post about a canvasser in Philly has been widely circulated even though it's not nearly as substantive an illustrator of the same phenomenon as what I wrote days prior. (Not that I'm looking to be famous, Ben Smith.)

Anyway, the canvasser working the Fishtown neighborhood says the following:

"What's crazy is this," he writes. "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

To drive the point home, I described the same exact thing, not that I'm bitter and clinging to my gun or anything.

But the point of linking the Ben Smith anecdote was to describe the Fishtown neighborhood to the curious.

Growing up in Philly, I was a very sweet child raised in a bohemian artsy punk grunge neighborhood in South Philly called Queen Village that was gentrifying at a blistering pace. My best friend lived in Fishtown, which was a few miles to the North. Queen Village was just south of Old City and Society Hill, the colonial heart of Philadelphia while Fishtown was just north, albeit a little further out, separated by another neighborhood and a crumbling warehouse/manufacturing strip. Where Queen Village changed drastically through the '90s, Fishtown remained a working class Irish neighborhood.

I was very sweet and small as an elementary school aged child, so when I went over to my Fishtown friend's house to play, I was red meat to the much tougher neighborhood kids and was harassed fairly regularly. I never did get beat up over there, as the charming friendliness of my friend and I always seemed to disarm those types of situations, not to mention the fact that Philadelphians often show their affection by acting just the opposite (I love this, by the way). Yet, there was no mistaking in my mind at a very early age that my native Queen Village was different from Fishtown, even before gentrification really exploded. My friend happened to live next door to an African American family but judging by the high number of novelty "parking for Irish only" signs adorning people's gates and front windows, R and his mom were pretty much isolated.

But now, since around 2000, Fishtown is transitioning too. Northern Liberties, just to the south of Fishtown developed a huge dive bar and nightclub scene toward the end of my high school days. Fishtown began to see a huge influx of hipsters looking to rent once people got priced out of Northern Liberties, where expensive lofts were developed at a ridiculous pace.

I'm not sure what it looks like now that the economy is falling apart, but I imagine Fishtown is still largely undervalued and attractive for hipsters fleeing the clearly inferior New York.

It is still largely a working class Irish neighborhood with a lot of blue collar union racists not particularly enthused about having to vote for this particular Democratic nominee (though most will). So Ben Smith's email is describing the Fishtown I grew up around pretty accurately. However Fishtown is increasingly popular for the young people, a trend that many old neighborhood guys may not be particularly happy about.

Only hateful GOP fringe and unapologetic racists remain in McCain coalition

The McCain campaign made the decision to go dirty on Barack Obama. Many pundit types grimly suggested that this was the right decision for the McCain campaign given his increasingly abysmal situation in the polls. The line was that he needed to do something to shake things up. He needed to change the conversation, refocus the media off of issues and onto trite matters of personality.

So the McCain camp did just that. They sent out Sarah Puppet to suggest that Barack Obama condones terrorism, supports terrorists, or is one himself. They whipped up their rally crowds into animalistic frenzies and did nothing to discourage taunts of "kill him" and worse. They pushed this extremely dubious Ayers connection in the media and hoped it would draw ratings and dominate the news cycle.

Basically, they felt out the strategy. They tested the waters.

From my view, it didn't seem to have stuck. The media played with it and it got no ratings and provoked no equal and opposite reaction from the Obama camp.

McCain didn't bring it up at the debate.

But really what may have happened was that the McCain campaign was testing not so much whether or not they could get the Ayers connection into the narrative but instead were feeling for the limits of mainstream acceptability. The shouts of "kill him" and the "palling around with terrorists" line indeed provoked some rebuke from mainstream media bigwigs. They called it "ugliness," but I think what the McCain campaign saw was that there were a few more inches to take.

That's why today, we have absolute filth like this, which I refuse to embed.

Whether or not it makes any difference to the electorate is dependent on the media's willingness to call these lies out for what they are. Otherwise, the McCain camp will continue to inch forward with increasingly hateful smears.

Overall, I think the public and the media will be pretty sickened by this and the strategy will ultimately yield the same results as much of the Steve Schmidt era:

The GOP base and affiliated racists will be angry and fired up and most everyone else will be totally turned off.

Ultimately this has been the net effect of Palin's spot on the ticket, for instance.

The risk that McCain is taking here is that should he cross the threshold of acceptability with the center-right mainstream media, he's taking down the entire GOP with him. It's not just his legacy he's putting on the line for this election, it's the party backing him.

While it is possible that these attacks might change the dynamics of this election, isn't it more likely that the erratic and poorly organized McCain team crosses the line blatantly enough for the whole strategy to backfire in their face?

If the GOP brass were smart, they'd let John McCain know that there is a limit to what he can get away with in terms of media reaction without damaging the party for the next election cycle.

If the media backlash against the hatefulness of the GOP is large enough, if they pander too much to the fringe, doesn't the GOP risk some degree of political marginalization in a new Washington dominated by the Dems?

The few extra points he might get in the tracking polls probably isn't worth the risk given that he's down nearly double digits, even if the pundit class claim that his negative smear campaign has been "working."

Friday A.M. Update: Here's a new despicable ad from the McCain camp that sticks to the same sordid insinuations but seems slightly dialed back compared to the absolute abomination from yesterday.

McCain in High Def: the 2nd Debate

This town hall format was sooo up McCain's alley, right?

Eh maybe not so much.

He didn't look so hot did he?

There were a couple of times where he seemed like he lost his breath.

Not ready to lead.

debate 1 reaction

Angry and Desperate: The Real John McCain

John McCain knows he's falling fast in the polls and has been a hindrance to the bailout bill so he's working overtime, more or less begging the public, the media, and members of his own party to listen to him. The campaign is free-falling right now, unable to stay on message long enough to to massage the media narrative.

Thus the John McCain we're getting on the campaign trail right now is an unfiltered John McCain, an off the cuff John McCain. He's improvising out there and has taken a much more angry and confrontational tone over the last 24-48 hours. But it's not str8 talk McCain up there, it's this contentious and bitter old man I've never really seen before.



And he seems to be doing a media blitz with this attitude. Here he is defending his campaign's assertion that Barack Obama supports teaching sex to kindergarten students:



He was also on NPR this morning giving an interview in which he defended the sex ed lie once more.

While we can see very plainly that his campaign is disorganized and panicking, perhaps it's also beginning to appear that the man himself is losing his bearings under the immense pressure of the financial crisis.