Posts: 78

1. 

   The Hotness Ticket

   01.Sep.08, 16:16 EDT
   
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   I watched Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the DNC Thursday night and didn't know quite what to think. He had three hard acts to follow in the rousing, emotional, pitch-perfect speeches of Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the master, Bill Clinton.
   
   I think he did well enough. He covered his bases, got a little more specific on what he means by "change". He had a couple of good lines, and at the end hinted at why he's considered a great orator.
   
   But he didn't get me in my gut, either. I didn't feel that same catch-my-breath wow as after the race speech, or after the first time watching the will.i.am "Yes We Can" video.
   
   I just thought that on the whole, the Dems really took back the race from the creeping malaise of August poll slumps. They presented a much more credible, interesting argument than they had in 2004, 2000, or even 1996.
   
   I figured the Republicans would nail up their own coffin with a stultifying tea party in St. Paul for a guy they barely like.
   
   Then John McCain drafted a surprise player — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Her name had been mentioned as a potential veep candidate, but never seriously. The media was parked in the bushes outside the hotel rooms of guys like Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty.
   
   Knowing nothing about the 44-year-old, I had to consult the oracle of Wikipedia. Then I felt the butterflies return.
   
   She's very interesting. Mother of five, including a Down syndrome baby just five months old. New governor of Alaska. Bigtime maverick not afraid to take down members of her own party for a good cause. Bright, articulate, clearly a rising star on a conservative course parallel to Obama's. And hot, of course. Former beauty pageant hot.
   
   It was a great move on McCain's part, as well as showing just how desperate he is to reach his goal. Palin is someone he barely knows, someone barely more than half his age, with scant government credentials.
   
   But she looks good, sounds good, and has a compelling backstory. She's got a vagina, which his team clearly hopes will bring in the disgruntled Hillary supporters.
   
   I love the fact that she comes from the coldest frontier state, while he comes from one of the hottest. It's a fire and ice, old and new combo. It could work, but more likely will just crack the fragile glass, like when you make iced coffee without tempering the concoction with a spoon.
   
   Watching the press conference where Palin introduced herself to the world, it was clear from McCain's body language that this is as uncomfortable a shotgun marriage as the Mondale-Ferraro hitchup in 1984.
   
   McCain looked like he was giving the keys to his lovingly restored classic Corvette to his teenaged daughter. His forced smile and stiff carriage as he waited for the girl to finish her speech and jump into the background said it all.
   
   Can Sarah inject enough juice into the ticket without becoming an obvious admission of fear by an old warrior? We'll see.
   
   Rebecca Wakefield is MOLI's Election Center editor.

2. 

   Presidential Woman

   27.Aug.08, 22:18 EDT
   
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   First Michelle Obama blew away the DNC with her eloquence, humanity, and American credentials. Then Hillary Clinton showed why she probably would have made a hell of a president. Or still could.
   
   Salon's Joan Walsh lays out the case that she pulled off a great performance, whether or not it was all about her, or Obama, or Bill, or McCain.
   
   "Hillary Clinton's job seemed impossible Tuesday night. In one half-hour prime-time speech, she was expected to win over the estimated quarter of her voters holding out on Barack Obama, get more of her big donors to open their wallets, quiet rumors that her husband is still smarting over the bitter primary race, and say enough glowing things about Obama to get John McCain to stop using her in campaign ads. ...There may be critics — for Clinton, there always are — but she hit all her targets Tuesday night, even working in a joke about her pantsuits."
   
   Slate's John Dickerson said it well in his analysis of Hillary's speech. "The old complaint about the Clintons is that they only care about themselves. They'll do anything to win. They never let go. Clinton turned that stereotype on its head in the centerpiece of her speech. 'Were you in this campaign just for me?' she asked, and the correct answer, surprisingly, was no."
   
   In short, Hillary is a professional and she showed that last night. In the curious blend of logic and emotion that is politics, this savvy candidate did what she was asked to do, while laying the groundwork for her own future. Weigh this speech — or Michelle's — against any the Republicans are likely to give next week. Win or lose in November, the Democrats are building some actual, credible, issued-based leadership here, something they, and we, haven't had in years.
   
   If Barack can follow Michelle and Hillary well enough, his election is assured. If not, they will end up making him look as paper thin as his critics charge. Stay tuned.
   
   Rebecca Wakefield is MOLI's Election Center editor.
   

3. Michelle Obama for President

   26.Aug.08, 13:42 EDT
   
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   We were lying in bed last night, lazily splicing coverage of the Democratic National Convention with reruns of My Name is Earl (an excellent method of digestion), when Michelle Obama began to speak. 
   
   Suddenly, my baby daddy looked up. "Hey, she's good!" he said. "Why isn't she running for president? She's a better speaker than Barack."
   
   It's interesting the extent to which Barack Obama owes the success of his candidacy to women -- Hillary Clinton and his wife, Michelle, certainly. But also to early supporters Caroline Kennedy and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill.
   
   Until Hillary, first ladies were generally background types (if you don't count Jackie Kennedy's Camelot fashion or Eleanor Roosevelt's civil rights advocacy).
   
   Michelle is something between Eleanor and Hillary. Time has a revealing piece about how her career choices -- from fast-track lawyer to aide to Chicago mayor Richard Daily, to heading a nonprofit, to becoming a university bigwig -- helped Barack build the incredible organizing machine that's become the basis of his campaign.
   
   A couple of observations about the convention. Typical fare, mostly. It is amazing how the cable news channels, CNN in particular, are branding the election. Every single shot featuring talking heads has the CNN logo in the background -- on screens, on banners, on umbrellas, even on neon-lit beer signs.
   
   Also, what's up with those little factoids offered at the bottom of the screen? Reminds me of the pop-up facts they put on movies and music videos on some channels.
   
   I've decided that I hate Wolf Blitzer. I'm not sure why exactly, because he's probably no smarmier than the rest, but there's just something about the guy that makes me grind my teeth and mutter, "what a dick."
   
   Next up: the Hillary Clinton performance.

4. 

   About Obama

   25.Aug.08, 16:32 EDT
   
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   If you read nothing else this week, pick up a copy of Newsweek. They've done a really nice job of laying out the Cliff's Notes version of just who these presumptive Democrats are running for king and vice-king of the country.
   
   The cover feature is about how Barack Obama's absent father shaped him into a "cerebral and cool", but "steely" and self-reliant world shaker. It's a little sappy, with imagery of the young Obama only meeting his father once, at an airport in Honolulu. "Deprived of a father's love, Obama chose to build his own universe, an invisible center where the failings and flightiness of others could do him the least harm."
   
   Yeah, okay. Cue "Love Child".
   
   Obama's take on his brilliant but distant father figure's effect on his own ambition is this: "You could argue that if you're too well adjusted, you don't end up running for president."
   
   And also that his childhood created "impulses that continue in me to this day, and that is between the idealism of my mother and her sense of empathy and compassion, and the hard-headed realism that the world out there can be tough."
   
   Don't stop there. The son of the guy who wrote the movie most often quoted by gay-and/or redneck- baiting teenaged boys, Deliverance, has a nice sociological pastiche of the Southern mind when it comes to Obama. It's the crazy aunt in the attic no one mentions but everyone knows is there. And she's off her meds.
   
   "Now this part of the country, where I have my deepest roots, feels raw again, its political emotions more exposed than they've been in decades, writes Christopher Dickey. "George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama have unsettled the South: the first with a reckless war and a weakened economy, the second with the color of his skin, the foreignness of his name, the lofty liberalism of his language. Suddenly the palliative prosperity that salved old, deep wounds no longer seems adequate to the task."
   
   It's good stuff, full of real anecdotes, not punditry. And that will be in short supply at this week's Democratic Convention.
   
   Rebecca Wakefield is MOLI's Election Center editor.

5. Good Hair + Foreign Policy Cred = VeepMagic

   24.Aug.08, 19:19 EDT
   
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   The polls for Barack Obama are not good right now, considering he was supposed to sweep into office on a cloud of Hope and sweet-smelling Change. It's not that he's losing. It's that he's slipped from a good lead in July to neck and neck with John McCain. That's if you combine all the major polls. Some polls, like Zogby's most recent one, have Obama trailing by five points nationally. Clearly, he's gotta put on a convincing show at this week's Democratic Convention.
   
   "Obama cannot buy enough 'experience' between now and November," pollster John Zogby wrote, "but he needs to be Jack Kennedy. He needs to clearly demonstrate "that the torch has passed to a new generation" and lay out a new, more positive image of America in the world of the 21^st Century, a vision for hope and opportunity. He needs to show that his very presence at the podium is an immigrant success story, much like Kennedy's and millions of Americans."
    
   What about McCain, Zogby? "As for McCain, ironically, he has consolidated his Republican base. He now gets 83% of Republicans and over 80% of conservatives who support him against Obama. It's time for McCain to accentuate the fact that he's a maverick, a moderate, that he is anti-government, that he knows firsthand how dysfunctional Washington is and that he is the right man to clean it up. Sounds a lot like Harry Truman. John Kennedy vs. Harry Truman in 2008. Now that's worth the price of admission."
   
   Of course, there are a lot of Zogby-haters out there in number-crunching land. He's considered by some a kind of disreputable, bad-boy pollster with rather loose survey methods. But sometimes he turns out to be right.

    

   Whether Joe Biden, Obama's veep pick makes a difference in those critical swing states remains to be seen. Currently, Obama enjoys nearly a 100 electoral vote lead, depending on which polls you follow. But McCain is well within striking distance, as new states swing red or blue at the last minute.
   
   I'll check in on this again after the conventions to see how the public, just now shaking the Olympics out of its eyes, responds to the big sell.
   
   

6. 

   Obama's Prom Date

   21.Aug.08, 17:59 EDT
   
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   As the Democratic Convention edges ever closer, the Obama campaign plays coy about who he's picking as his date to the big show. Obama is baiting the press corps like its an angry bear, or more accurately, a desperate, pleading bear. Read Mark Halperin's take on this exchange in Time's The Page. The fourth estate can't afford to get beat by a text message, after all.
   
   Politico's Kenneth Vogel reads Obama's tea leaves. The nutshell version is that nobody knows, although the likeliest names include Joe Biden and Tim Kaine. Time's Karen Tumulty thinks it's gonna be Evan Bayh.
   
   What gets me about all the calculations about which veep could help in this state or with that interest group is that it never works out according to the maths. As relevant a measure for selecting a veep is simply running the name through an elementary school social test. How does it look on a bumper sticker? How does it sounds when you say both names fast three times?
   
   Obama Biden Obama Kaine Obama Bayh? To my ear, ObamaKaine sounds good, kinda like Obama'cane, which could work in Florida. Obama Biden is a no go. No ring to it. Obama Bayh (pronounced bye). That's kinda soothing, like an Obamabye.

7. 

   The Ron Paul Effect

   21.Aug.08, 15:40 EDT
   
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   The slightly nutty appeal of fringe Republicans like Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee helped galvanize a segment of young conservatives for the primaries. Now that the general election has turned out to be business as usual, what will happen to those voters?
   
   Each candidate claimed a wing of the Republican Party — Paul appealed to anti-tax, anti-war libertarians, while Huckabee drew in the evangelicals. Huckabee threw his support behind John McCain. But Paul isn't endorsing anyone.
   
   According to the Associated Press, Paul is telling supporters that, "The contest is to get as many votes as we can to not support the two major candidates. [Electing a third-party candidate] would be the best thing for the country. Whether (Obama) wins or McCain wins, policies won't change."
   
   Paul really is a third party kind of guy and remarkably, his support has remained high even after ending his Quixotic run for president. His vast Web army never materialized on the street for two basic reasons. First, it was largely a headless, self-propelled campaign. Secondly, all those rabid Web 2.0 Paulites had little idea that Campaigning 101 involves lots of sweaty old-school door-to-door action.
   
   Anyway, Paul is still at it. While the Republicans stage their boring and largely pointless convention in St. Paul, Paul will stage his Rally for the Republic convention in Minneapolis. And from the looks of it, it will be better attended.
   
   Besides the slight figure of Ron Paul, possibly the least likely man to start a cult of personality, there are an eclectic group of speakers and performers guaranteed to turn the rally into something like Woodstock for libertarians.
   
   They've got Jesse Ventura, Barry Goldwater Jr., Tucker Carlson, and former MTV veejay Adam Curry, among others. The point of the rally is, according to the campaign's site, to issue "a clear call to the Republican Party to return to its roots of limited government, personal responsibility, and protection of our natural rights."
   
   I don't think most of the people who will be there believe in a revival of the Republican Party. Rather, this is clearly the beginning of Paul's eventual third party bid.
   
   Hence the coining of the term, "Ronvoy," described as a fleet of vans and buses carrying Ron Paul Revolutionaries for a campaign for liberty that claims about 85,000 members, with a goal of 100,000 by Sept. 2, when the main event begins.
   
   Even The New York Times seems to find it all cheekily amusing. "Due to popular demand, as the saying goes, Mr. Paul had to scrap plans to hold his event at the nearly 15,000-capacity Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota. Instead, his 'Rally for Liberty' will move to the Target Center in Minneapolis, which can hold up to 18,000."
   
   Those aren't Obama in Berlin numbers, but certainly should give the Republican Party pause, as it rests its hopes uneasily on McCain's shoulders.
   
   Rebecca Wakefield is MOLI's Election Center editor.

8. 

   The Question of Evil

   19.Aug.08, 19:19 EDT
   
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   This past weekend, besides Michael Phelps having won his eighth gold medal (unless that, too turns out to have been computer-generated by the Chinese), there was one of those moments of truth.
   
   The guy who is running to be "America's pastor" once Billy Graham kicks it, held auditions for president in front of his flock of suburban California evangelicals. And to those of us who are not often found lurking about warehouse-sized mega-churches in the O.C., the Rev. Rick Warren introduced himself.
   
   Warren has the girth and garrulity of Tim Russert, the fashion sense of Jimmy Buffet, and the marketing chops of Seth Godin. By all accounts, he won big by making both Barack Obama and John McCain comfortable enough to perform well in their hour-long interviews with him.
   
   He didn't ask any questions they hadn't answered before and didn't really press them on their answers. Yet, he managed to convey the sense that he'd been able to take them aside for a living room chat, one that revealed basic truths about their mindsets and characters.
   
   My favorite Rev. Rick Warren question was this: "Does evil exist and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it, or do we defeat it?"
   
   At first blush, this question is right up there with "if you could be any kind of tree, what color would it be?" It's abstract and tends to reveal only the degree to which the answerer is able to be clever.
   
   But the question of evil turned out to be just broad and inane enough to actually be revealing.
   
   "Ah, evil does exist," Obama began in his somewhat pedantic manner. "I think we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children."
   
   "It has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely. One of the things that I strongly believe, is that we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God's task. But we can be soldiers in that process. We can confront it when we see it. The one thing I think is very important is to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil. Because a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil. Just because we think our intentions are good doesn't always mean that we're going to be doing good."
   
   Asked the same question an hour later, McCain responded with a steely gaze and a soundbite: "Defeat it." Then he talked about going after Osama bin Laden.
   
   That question, by its very abstractness, gave the most insight into how each man's mind works. It showcased Obama's complex, almost academic thought structure, and McCain's inner smartass.
   
   Time's Mark Halperin gave both candidates an A-, with McCain scoring slightly higher on authority and audience reaction, and Obama scoring a bit better on clarity and credibility. I think that's a pretty good shorthand for why the polls are so close. This is no coincidence. Warren knows how to frame a pitch.
   
   Warren's website reads like a religious marketing seminar: "The Church is more widely spread – more widely distributed – than any business franchise in the world."
   
   Reading Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Warren in The Atlantic, it's clear Warren is as accomplished a politician as either candidate. He states his goals as "to restore civility, to restore responsibility to individuals, getting people to stop playing victim. And to restore credibility to churches, because in many ways they've been co-opted by politics."
   
   Clearly, whether or not those goals are achievable, Warren has succeeded in co-opting politics for the goal of making himself the gatekeeper between church and state.
   
   Rebecca Wakefield is MOLI's Election Center editor.

9. 

   Democracy's Toys

   18.Aug.08, 15:59 EDT
   
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   Sometimes the coolest way to think about democracy is to buy some. So this week, I indulged my need to find a neat gift palatable to my ever-shrinking wallet. In this mission, I wandered from the blinding hot streets of South Beach into the Art Deco coolness of The Wolfsonian, a cultural gem in the unlikely nest of a cultural wasteland.
   
   The Wolfsonian feels like a cross between a turn-of-the-century bank and a WWII-era library bunker. The next Indiana Jones could easily be shot in this place, not least because most of what's in it hails from the period roughly between the Victorian Age and 1945.
   
   It's a museum dedicated to design, or as it claims "a diverse array of broad themes of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries - nationalism, political persuasion, industrialization, architecture and urbanism, consumerism and advertising, transportation, and world's fairs."
   
   Currently on display is Thoughts on Democracy, a collection of posters created by some 60 artists reinterpreting Norman Rockwell's classic 1943 Four Freedoms illustrations, which the U.S. Office of War Information used to communicate FDR's vision of "a world founded upon four essential human freedoms". (The four are Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear.)
   
   It's a very cool way of re-centering political focus from the cult of personality to the needs and values of the individual and the community. And you can buy a poster for $25.
   
   But to be honest, I was even more delighted by the fabulous toys in the museum's gift shop. Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad geniuses who brought you the subtly insane Burger King ads, designed some of the products offered up for sale. These include miniature buttons for a buck, Ad Lib notepads of the Star-Spangled Banner for five bucks, and for ten bucks, Political Post-it® Notes featuring Obama and McCain with empty word bubbles over their heads for you to fill in. Actually, I think these are official reporter notepads for the cable news channels. Makes grabbing those out-of-context sound bites that much easier.

    

   The gift shop also had "Little Thinkers" dolls of Frida Kahlo, Che Guevara, Friedrich Nietzsche and other radical types. What a tea party that would be. Although I wonder if you're just setting yourself up for a hellish time in puberty, giving a kid a Nietzsche doll. Also in this series were finger puppet "revolutionaries" including Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Che again and Leon Trotsky.
   
   There were Disappearing Civil Liberties mugs, where the Bill of Rights starts to go blank when you add hot liquid. There was a paparazzi play set, complete with velvet rope and camera-wielding goons. There was "Vote" soap and a "Hail to the Chief " presidential election game, a red-state, blue-state puzzle. I had to be physically restrained from buying the Oscar Wilde action figure, or the red-velvet-covered bust of Chairman Mao that was also a piggy bank. Too delicious.
   
   Rebecca Wakefield is MOLI's Election Center editor.

10. 

    Politics Doesn't Take a Holiday

    15.Aug.08, 17:32 EDT
    
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    Incredibly, there are roughly 80 days left before we pick a president and get back to our regularly scheduled apathy. This week, with Obama on vacation and McCain with Georgia on his mind, you are, like any sane person, watching the Olympics.
    
    But, in case you like a little political action in between the carnival acts, here are a few things to check out.
    
    Jerome Corsi, who four years ago co-wrote Unfit for Command, which launched the nasty Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry, is back with a new literary strafing, this time of Barack Obama. The Grey Lady calls Corsi a "conservative gadfly," although nutcase would also suffice.
    
    The book, Obama Nation, is a bestseller, although telling, only because of "bulk sales". Or, perhaps, because "several of the book's accusations, in fact, are unsubstantiated, misleading or inaccurate." Media Matters went through the book and pointed out the bullshit, point by point.
    
    And John Kerry himself launched a site to deflate Corsi's attack. If only he'd done that four years ago.
    
    Meanwhile, even the Republicans are ignoring McCain as they focus on tearing down Obama on the RNC website, according to the Washington Post. The Post notes that McCain isn't really taking advantage of his rival being on vacation to seize the momentum, although his lobbyist buddy is getting a lot of traction out of the Russia-Georgia conflict. Mother Jones offers anecdotes from the growing Obamacan movement.

     

    Thomas Friedman tsk-tskes McCain for talking big on alternative energy, but failing to show up for any of the last eight votes to subsidize wind and solar power. He says both candidates need to either pony up for big-visioned alternative energy policy or admit their talk is "just bogus rhetoric designed by cynical candidates who think Americans are so stupid — so bloody stupid — that if you just show them wind turbines in your Olympics ad, they'll actually think you showed up and voted for such renewable power — when you didn't."
    
    And Slate takes a look at the two lives of Obama — the one he talks about and the one the press documents. It's an interactive timeline that includes his speeches, autobiographies, and press accounts at every point of his life. A fascinating toy for Obama obsessive-compulsives and debunkers from either right or left.
    
    Finally, Politico pronounces the election too close to call. Obama may win in November, but it won't be by a landslide. The site bases this conclusion on the results of several previous elections, in which a landslide was always apparent by late summer. The exception was Ronald Reagan.
    
    Rebecca Wakefield is MOLI's Election Center editor.