The Lion and Gun

Andy McCarthy, who has been pushing the Obama-as-terrorist theme more than any other voice at NRO's Corner (and that's a pretty remarkable achievement), managed to pass self-parody into genuine creepiness and come full circle back to self-parody again. To wit, his latest post's title, which is not at all in any way meant to be ironic (seriously), is: Did Obama Write "Dreams from My Father" ... Or Did Ayers?

In Andy's honor, and since it's the weekend, here's the Beta Band:

Spencer Ackerman:

[T]o quote a prominent racist undone by his own racism, we're going to kick their soft teeth down their whining throats. Newsweek's poll showed a race knotted at 46 percent last month. Now it shows a double-digit Obama lead. Gallup shows the same thing. Nate Silver concludes his overview of the state of the race by saying "any world in which McCain has a chance to win on Election Day is a world that looks very different from this one."

In the world we live in, isn't it better to have a reckoning with racism, with the euphemism stripped away? Where the 27-percenters -- actually down to 25 if Newsweek is to be believed -- expose themselves as the frothing death-rattlers they are, braying for a dying past? I wonder if it's dilettantish of me, little white boy, to find something potentially redemptive in the face of the Hate Talk Express. But for the first time, without a single match being ignited, doesn't it feel as if we can burn the remnant of Nixonland to the ground?

Has McCain's entreaty to stash away the pitchforks come too late? After all, he was booed when calling upon supporters at a town hall meeting to be respectful toward his Democratic opponent. It's to McCain's credit that he's finally trying to throw a wet blanket over this bloodlust, but it shouldn't be forgotten that it was his shameful campaign over the past week that brought things to this point. It says much about his character that he was unwilling to confront the almost murderous cries of his supporters until pressured by the media to do so -- and, no doubt, with internal polling to show him the way. McCain remains a small man, a petty and cowardly man, who has put his reckless ambition before service, thought, and common decency.

The descent of John McCain has been, to me, profoundly disappointing. I would not call myself a conservative, but I think that there are many ideas worth thinking about and engaging with on the right -- ideas that had been drowned out for almost as long as I can remember (admittedly that isn't very long), and certainly for the past eight years, but that I thought had a chance to come forth this year. Alas.

Two parting thoughts. First, while much that she did irritated me (to put it diplomatically), in many ways Hillary Clinton became a better candidate, if not a better person, as the Democratic primary battles wore on. McCain, however, has become worse by both metrics. Second, what has gone unreported, or at least unremarked, is the audacity of the questioners. These aren't people shouting out 'terrorist' in the midst of a cheering crowd. They are folks that waited in line formulating their question, their one opportunity to speak to a man they hope will soon be the most powerful in the world, and they used that chance to brand Obama an Arab, a terrorist, a socialist. The story here, though, isn't about the wingnuts -- the Republicans do not (I'm sorry to say) have a monopoly on wingnuts. The story is about a campaign that has empowered the wingnuts to stand in front of thousands of their peers, television cameras, and the man who would be President, and say such vile things.

Photo reprinted under a Creative Commons license from Desiree Williams

The report of the Alaska state legislature's investigation into Sarah Palin's firing of Walt Monegan after pressuring the public safety commissioner to fire her trooper brother-in-law has been released. In short, it finds that she was within her rights to fire Monegan, but in trying to get the trooper fired abused her power and violated state ethics laws, and that she was dishonest in her portrayal of the threat her brother-in-law posed.

Bright side for the McCain campaign: it's Friday night and it missed the evening news.

(h/t Swampland)

Over at NRO Peter Robinson has posted a list of 100 economists who've signed a letter warning against adoption of Barack Obama's economic proposals. (The post title -- 'The Booming of the Big Guns' -- he probably stole from Victor Davis Hanson.) Perennial buzzkill Jonathan Chait at TNR, however, finds two flaws with Robinson's list:

First, 100 economists is not actually all that many, given the number of economists in our country. Second, the list of signatories actually has only 90 economists on it.

John Zogby thinks it could go either way.

Ah, we kid, we kid. It's so easy to make fun of John Zogby for being a complete hack of a pollster, but in truth . . . well, it's so easy to make fun of John Zogby for being a complete hack of a pollster.

David Weigel at Reason makes a really good point about why the images of McCain supporters in ecstasy shouting derision of Obama is probably not a good campaign tactic:

Voters can get angry, but they don't want to think they're part of a mob. To make a really outsized analogy, historians of the 60s agree that the thuggery of cops on the Edmund Pettus bridge and video of ugly whites attacking blacks had the biggest impact on shifting mainstream white attitudes on civil rights. Obviously McCain supporters aren't attacking Obama supporters, but the unidentified man who yelled "terrorist!" when McCain asked "who is the real Barack Obama?" has gotten more ink than Palin's coaxed attack on Wright.

In case you were wondering, we're thinking about taking over Iceland. Hope you like some Björk with your Celine Dion.

(h/t Yglesias)

Not safe for work:

Fox News's Michael Barone clings to futile hope by suggesting Obama's ground ops got no game. Sean Quinn at FiveThirtyEight, who has spent the last month visiting both campaigns' ground operations in several swing states, responds pretty forcefully: oh, he got game.

[Incidentally, Locke apologizes for clearly being a white guy who thinks it's 1997.]

In modernity, scholars tell us, identity is often constructed in opposition to an 'other' -- an 'us versus them' mentality that makes clear what we are by showing ourselves to be different from them. This is exacerbated by conflicting loyalties, isolation, dislocation, economic stagnation, alcohol and drug abuse and secularization and political corruption and the break-down of the traditional family unit -- all those things, in other words, that separate our present and our future from our past seen through a glass darkly: what we believe we were and aren't but ought to be. It becomes ever more important to find some stranger in our midst, someone who we aren't, someone to blame.

There's no great intellectual innovation in placing these uncertainties at the root of some Americans' often irrational and usually misplaced fears: of blacks, intellectuals, immigrants, liberals, foreigners, and so on. I think Richard Hofstadter (to say nothing of Thomas Frank -- or, for that matter, Barack Obama in a certain infamous meeting with San Francisco donors) oversimplifies when suggesting that the entire weltanschauung of poor white America can be explained by status anxiety or the failure of liberal politics. Nevertheless, it seems clear that there is a certain segment of America that holds a seething hatred for another segment of America, and that in this election Sarah Palin and, improbably, John McCain have come to represent the former while Barack Obama has become a talisman of the latter.

This is how we begin to understand the anger being unleashed right now at McCain's and Palin's rallies. Conflating the Democrat with effete intellectuals from that 'other' America has long been a fruitful strategy for Republicans, but now we're approaching what looks like a perfect storm: a President who for eight years has worked his conservative base into a lather; a potential President who is a cerebral northern urban Harvard black man with an Arab name; wars with Arab and Afghan 'others' seven years after deadly and fearful attacks on America; a movement threatened with spending a few cycles, maybe as much as a generation, in the political wilderness; and now -- the tip of the sword -- thinly-veiled accusations in the form of political rhetoric that Barack Obama is a terrorist sympathizer (if not a terrorist himself). The McCain campaign is playing on the minds of people who read those emails and still believe Obama's Muslim; it's knowingly turning him into a Manchurian candidate before these people's eyes. Republican operatives and conservative 'intellectuals' are casting it as patriotic duty to prevent Barack Obama from assuming the Presidency. They are, in short, harnessing all of the anger and fear and frustration of millions of people and directing it at this single man.

They're unleashing a dangerous and unpredictable force. McCain rallies are looking more like Nuremberg by the day -- the fervor, the leader-worship, the undirected anger. America is not Germany in the 1920s, and McCain's not about to whip the crowds into a pogrom. But it's reasonable to fear that at least one person will be driven to violence.

One person is enough.

Read more about this in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico. Obama's response to the anger unleashed at McCain rallies can be seen at Talking Points Memo.

If you're reading the news you will no doubt see the go-to photograph for financial crisis - the sad dude on a trading floor. They will either be looking up at trading screens, pulling on their hair, rubbing their eyes, or just generally looking terrified. I love these photos. Here's a whole blog of them. (bonus points to them for using the term 'meme')

It's getting even worse out there.

On the bright side, it yet again gives us occasion to mock McCain Senior Economic Advisor Kevin Hassett, who wrote...and you still can't make this stuff up...Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market .

This Gallup chart pretty much says it all. Good thing neither of us are currently looking for jobs!

There's been a great deal of sturm und drang lately about just who the 'real' John McCain is, which makes his questions about who Obama is a little bit ironic. Some hypothesize that we're only now seeing McCain for who he really is; others insist that he is chafing under the pressures of the election and the advice of his strategists. Nobody can really say for sure what is in McCain's heart of hearts, but the truth (as always) likely lies somewhere in the middle. I think David Corn gets it about right:

Many of the folks in charge of the McCain campaign don't really care that much for him. Worse, they are treating McCain as a generic Republican candidate--smothering whatever once was special about him. And McCain has allowed this to happen. He has emasculated himself.

There's been much talk about how Eugene Fama, founder of Efficient Markets Theory, is pretty much S.O.L. on getting the Nobel Prize for Economics this year (one example here). But how's this for timing - Fama gave a talk today on the history and evidence for Efficient Markets Theory. Making it doubly ironic, the talk is a part of the forum named after Myron Scholes, of Long-Term Capital Management fame...

Ezra Klein has more than once made the argument that elections are fundamentally structural, their result determined mostly by exogenous events and issues that concern the public in the weeks immediately before voting, not ideology or the ins-and-outs of campaigning. I wouldn't carry the argument as far as he does, but certainly there's merit to it.

Now Klein has presented us with an interesting graph (originally posted at State of the Union) which clearly proves that stock prices have a direct and unambiguous relationship with McCain's polling performance:



Now, I'd never want you to expect your Lion and Gun reporters to accept anything at face value, so I did a little digging and found a few minor problems with the chart (beyond the massively obvious post hoc fallacy). Its creator describes it thus:

McCain’s tracking numbers against the S&P 500 over the past two weeks, with a two-day lag to let the market results filter through Gallup’s rolling average.

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Incentives shift when a political campaign is doomed: an every man for himself mentality takes hold as political strategists hoping to salvage some scraps of their reputations from the wreckage of the campaign begin to jump overboard and swim for shore. Many will push others over the side on their way.

It goes without saying that for anyone on the other team watching this is jolly fun.

I fondly remember the slow-motion trainwreck that was the Clinton campaign post-South Carolina. Personality conflicts and mutual recrimination were carried out first via e-mail and then via the New York Times; there was drama and hubris and childish petulance -- like an episode of the O.C. with ugly people and no fist-fights on the beach.

It would be too much to hope for the same kind of glorious self-destruction from team McCain, if only because there's just 25 days to go and nobody quite so consistently and audaciously wrong about everything as the reviled and gecko-like Mr. Penn. Still, leaked campaign conference calls about internal messaging disputes tickle the senses and promise more. I hope the campaign doesn't play the tease because I really look forward to seeing knives drawn over the next three weeks.

Despite the McCain campaign's best efforts to stymie the Alaska legislature's investigation into Sarah Palin's dismissal of public safety commissioner Walt Monegan, allegedly because he refused to remove her ex-brother-in-law from the force, the 'Troopergate' report is slated to be released today. To be perfectly honest, I think this story plays to the Dem base the way Ayers plays to the right: nobody else really cares and it's unlikely to make much of an impact on the election. After all, it'd be hard for Palin's numbers to decline any further. Nevertheless, the McCain campaign naturally feels the need to respond.

Typically, if you've got something coming down the pipe that's going to be damaging and hard to spin, you get in front of it by releasing the story first, on your own terms. You admit, more or less, to whatever it is you're supposed to have done, in a manner equal parts exculpatory and contrite, and you leverage small dollops of self-deprication into big heaps of forgiveness. That's what Obama did with Jeremiah Wright (assuming it was his campaign that leaked the videos back in March); it's what McCain and Palin did with her daughter's pregnancy.

It only works if you accept the blame, of course. And there are competing strategies -- George W. Bush, for one, has turned denial into an art form. But McCain has proven himself particularly adept at this kind of self-flagellation. The Keating Five Scandal and his misbegotten support of flying the Confederate flag during the 2000 primaries are two famous examples of McCain mea culpas that trumped whatever he'd done wrong and helped forge his straight-talking brand.

So it's a sign of how much hard-won wisdom his campaign has shed that its attempt to get in front of Troopergate has been to release its own report from its own 'investigation' that, obviously, exonerates Palin.

Look, denial might be enough with Troopergate; after all, nobody gives a damn anyway. But this buffoonish 'investigation' opens up the McCain campaign to ridicule and, worse, buttresses the central take-away from Troopergate: that Sarah Palin is as corrupt as any other pol. Already her claims of opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere have spiraled down in flames like one of John McCain's planes, damaging her reformer brand. Neither of these 'investigations' will help. Most Americans have at least a vague sense of justice that extends to not being judge at your own trial. The kind of person who would do something like that is maybe also the kind of person who'd abuse the powers of her office for personal retribution.

Obama's going primetime, having bought half an hour of time on CBS and NBC at the end of the month (possibly also Fox, which will be airing game six of the World Series if there is a game six of the World Series). Hopefully whatever it is will be more riveting than the last such purchase of airtime -- Ross Perot's economics lectures back in 1992.

In what would surely be alarming news if we weren't all used to it by now, the Dow took another nosedive today. Money markets are still frozen which Paul Krugman tells me is much, much worse news, and I believe him because he knows a hell of a lot more about this than I do. Still, I'm not worried. I've got a small arsenal and a two-way radio and a goddamn shitload of canned goods here at The Lion and Gun's Toronto bureau. I'm ready for anything.

Bring it.

Ross mentioned in his quick debate wrap-up the moment where John McCain assumed an African-American questioner had never heard of Fannie Mae. That questioner, Oliver Clark, has responded:

How did I feel about Sen. McCain stating “You probably never heard of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac before this.”
Well Senator, I actually did. I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. I have a bachelor degree in Political Science from Tennessee State, so I try to keep myself up to date with current affairs. I have a Master degree in Legal Studies from Southern Illinois University, a few years in law school, and I am currently pursuing a Master in Public Administration from the University of Memphis. In defense of the Senator from Arizona I would say he is an older guy, and may have made an underestimation of my age. Honest mistake. However, it could be because I am a young African-American male. Whatever the case may be it was somewhat condescending regardless of my age to make an assumption regarding whether I was knowledgeable about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Obama's response to his opponent's cowardly and despicable and politically idiotic attacks is pitch-perfect: rational and cool, nothing to hide, and just a little annoyed and dismissive. Best of all is Obama's challenge: Why won't he say it to my face? Without overplaying his hand, Obama should develop this line over the next week, pressure McCain to confront him on Ayers in that final debate. Force McCain to choose between televised cowardice or televised douchebaggery. The latter might titillate the base (rmoe starbursts for Lowry) but either's a win for Obama.

Late update: Looks like Biden's pressing the challenge. Good.

History has shown that any American President risks his life by virtue of being President. The nation's first African-American President will face an even greater risk by virtue of his skin color. With that in minds, the video below is genuinely frightening. And I am convinced that the morally and intellectually bankrupt charlatans on the right are -- willfully or not -- aiding and abetting in their ravenous quest to see their guy win at any cost.



(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

In the world of right-wing buffoonery Hugh Hewitt is so much a self-caricature that it almost feels unfair to ridicule him -- almost.

Apparently his latest book, How Sarah Palin Won the Election and Saved America, has yet to find a publisher. Drag.

Foreign Policy has a brief but fascinating interview with the New York Times' man in Afghanistan, Dexter Filkins. Key exchanges:

FP: Every year, Foreign Policy publishes a Failed States Index ranking the world’s countries in terms of stability. Pakistan ranked ninth on that list this year—up from 12th in 2007. How would you describe the stability of the Pakistani state? Might we see a national collapse?

DF: It’s such a chaotic place that I’m not sure what collapse would look like compared with the day-to-day anarchy that prevails there. Could things get worse there? Absolutely. But I don’t know what that would look like.

It seems McCain's 'Resurgence' plan to have the government refinance mortgages initially indicated that the money would come from the bailout and that the government would purchase the mortgages at below face value, forcing irresponsible lenders and investors to take a 'haircut'. Now, as we've seen, he's changed his mind and decided to take the money from elsewhere and not punish lending institutions for their reckless decisions. My question, then, is simple: Why? Obviously this wasn't an oversight in what looked like a hastily-formulated plan; McCain and his advisers considered and rejected one common-sense provision that would remove some moral hazard from the proposal and another that would have squared it with his promise to freeze federal spending. Why? For me the question isn't rhetorical -- presumably there was some reason, even if not a very good one, for the decision. I don't buy that this was somehow a cave-in to banking lobbyists. So what does that leave? Does it make sense either politically (I don't think so) or economically (I'm doubtful but less sure)?

A few days ago Ross gave some sage advice to whoever might listen: recapitalize now.

Seems Hank Paulson heard, and the Treasury is getting ready to inject some serious money into the banking system. (Nobody say 'nationalize'.) What little I know and understand of the situation tells me that pumping capital into banks to free up credit is a vastly better idea than taking all of their horrendous assets off their hands.

Update: The Wall Street Journal, however, says 'no such moves are imminent.' Could be just a trial balloon. We'll keep you posted.

Note to Dean Reynolds: It's. Not. All. About. You.

The Obama aides who deal with the national reporters on the campaign plane are often overwhelmed, overworked and un-informed about where, when, why or how the candidate is moving about. Baggage calls are preposterously early with the explanation that it's all for security reasons....

The national headquarters in Chicago airily dismisses complaints from journalists wondering why a schedule cannot be printed up or at least e-mailed in time to make coverage plans. Nor is there much sympathy for those of us who report for a newscast that airs in the early evening hours. Our shows place a premium on live reporting from the scene of campaign events. But this campaign can often be found in the air and flying around at the time the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" is broadcast. I suspect there is a feeling within the Obama campaign that the broadcast networks are less influential in the age of the internet and thus needn't be accomodated as in the days of yore. Even if it's true, they are only hurting themselves by dissing audiences that run in the tens of millions every night.

The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who've been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure.

The McCain campaign plane is better than Obama's, which is cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.

It annoys me when the media propagates misinformation. (I find myself frequently annoyed.) For example, there's been a lot of talk recently -- as in this CNN piece -- about 'the Bradley Effect', presumably because giving baseless arguments a name (especially one using words like 'Effect' or 'Factor' or 'Laffer Curve') makes them not baseless anymore. The Bradley Effect, so the story goes, 'could cost Obama the election' because a certain proportion of white voters won't vote for a black man. Problem is, that's called bigotry, not the Bradley Effect. The Bradley Effect refers to the tendency for some white voters to claim to pollsters that they're supporting the black candidate, or that they're undecided, because they're concerned that they'll be seen as racist otherwise. Moreover, as the article goes on to say:

In the past 15 years or so, there is no indication that this phenomenon has been a factor in statewide races — but no national test, since Obama is the first African-American candidate with a legitimate chance at the White House.

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According to Marty Peretz the Senior Senator from Massachusetts has been telling anyone who'll listen that Obama promised he'd be Secretary of State. Fortunately nobody really believes him.

Photo reprinted under a Creative Commons License from The World Economic Forum

Fired Lehman employees can't even have the solace to know that the Indian guys who took their jobs got fired too. Nomura bought their operations.

Lehman Building in Manhattan. Photo by Ananawa

Details have emerged on McCain's 'Resurgence' plan for homeowners unveiled at last night's debate. It is similar to a $300 billion provision under this summer's housing bill which would have the government take bad mortgages off the hands of homeowners and refinance them with cheaper Federal Housing Authority mortgages. The key difference is that the current plan has lenders and investors reduce the mortgage principal and thus take a loss on the original loan whereas McCain's would have the government purchase the mortgages at full face value forcing taxpayers to absorb the cost instead.

Two of the major arguments against the bailout bill were the moral hazard it would create and the undue burden and risk it placed on taxpayers. How does McCain's plan not ratchet both of those problems up for no good reason? Ross, you're the expert here; why should the government not penalize banks for making bad loans?

I laughed during the VP debate when Palin called herself an Energy 'expert'. I know real energy experts...and Sarah Palin is no energy expert - but that's not why I was so amused. I expect politicians to claim to be experts in things they know nothing about, they all do that. What stunned me was that she claimed energy as the area that she has the most expertise. That's rare (who would ever pick energy exactly?) - and frightening. So naturally I was doubly amused when Tom Friedman excoriated her this morning. My favorite part:

And please also don’t tell me she is an “energy expert.” She is an energy expert exactly the same way the king of Saudi Arabia is an energy expert — by accident of residence. Palin happens to be governor of the Saudi Arabia of America — Alaska — and the only energy expertise she has is the same as the king of Saudi Arabia’s. It’s about how the windfall profits from the oil in their respective kingdoms should be divided between the oil companies and the people. At least the king of Saudi Arabia, in advocating “drill baby drill,” is serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil.

The left's vast Orwellian conspiracy to deny conservative movie-makers the box office credit they're due has come one step closer to destroying Freedom. From Little Miss Atilla (emphasis mine):

What we know: in at least ten theaters nationwide, customers were sold tickets they were told were for An American Carol but turned out to be for other movies.

Obviously, this type of "error"/error potentially requires collusion between employees . . . If [your tickets] have the wrong movie title on them, please take a picture of them and send them to the investigative team at An American Carol: complaints -- AT -- AnAmericanCarol -- DOT -- com . Please place the original tickets in a safe place and fill out the info on the AAC complaint site. They may need your ticket as evidence, should this turn out to be part of a larger pattern.

It's only one poll, but the Gallup tracker holds more weight and currency with the American public than any other, and today it shows Obama's lead growing wider than ever before. Almost all of this polling was conducted before last night's debate, which most people saw as an Obama victory, so it's only likely to go higher.

For now, it goes to eleven:

The McCain campaign is suspending its attacks on Obama's past associations. Oh, wait, no it isn't.

I've said this before, but this is the wrong attack on the wrong guy at the wrong time. It's way too late to try to portray Obama as a radical -- the time for that was back in March when instead the McCain campaign was cooling its heels and hoping Hillary and Barack would duke it out till November. Now Obama's the cool thoughtful conciliatory guy and the only people who think he's a 'wild-eyed radical' [sic] work for NRO. Attack ads don't work with independents anyway, and at a time of economic crisis they look like what they are: an attempt at distraction. What the hell does Willie Ayers have to do with failed banks and foreclosures? Oh, right: nothing.

McCain's campaign has to realize that the degree of Michelle Malkin's happiness is inversely proportional to their chances of winning. So the decision to shy away from this kind of attack last night was a good one; not one that'll win, but then there's no road going that way. Instead McCain's got to start thinking about his best exit strategy. It won't involve William Ayers -- nor a 100% negative ad campaign.

Erick Erickson at RedState sees an ingenious narrative coming together on the Republican side that will utterly destroy Obama's candidacy. The scandal? Apparently Obama sat on the board of an organization that received funding by way of a grant whose proposal was co-authored by William Ayers, and that board once approved a grant to ACORN, a nationwide association of community organizers with a spotty history of voter fraud which is in the news now (on page A17) because its Nevada branch is under investigation for that very reason. Erickson suspects this is part of a vast conspiracy involving Ayers and foreign donors and attempts to indoctrinate children in political radicalism and (of course!) hidden documents, and he didn't say this but I'm assuming Opus Dei and the Bildeberg Group and Rennes-le-Château are in there somewhere too.

And why would anybody ever imagine voters will be captivated and scandalized by a story about too many voter registration forms submitted by a branch of an organization another branch of which successfully applied ten years ago for a grant given out by another organization on whose board of directors Barack Obama sat? Because:

What type of movie do Americans really like? Not the popcorn flicks, but the ones that leave you saying "holy sh--" at the end when the credits roll. The Usual Suspects comes to mind.

Here's a movie where you have multiple story lines coming together toward the end, all connected to a central character, and when it finally dawns on you what just happened, wow — it is one heck of a movie. Separate plot elements dramatically merge into one coherent narrative and you realize had you been paying attention all along you would have seen it.

It really works. Those stories have powerful staying power.

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The Lion and Gun's crack team of researchers have analyzed the complete transcript of last night's debate and concluded that McCain invoked variations on 'my friends' a total of 22 times.

I've had some time to think about it, to look at my notes, to gauge reaction, but none of this has substantially changed my opinion. It was a marginal win for Obama, which is really a big win for Obama. Bad night for McCain, but then what could he do?

Surprisingly, what was supposed to be McCain's format actually preferred Obama, emphasizing his physical size and vitality while McCain skulked uneasily in the background. This was maybe not as damaging as the first debate's close-ups of McCain's Grinch-like sneer, but it also doesn't help that the take-away moment was, literally, 'That one.'

In terms of substance all that was notable was McCain's new mortgage rescue plan. Credit where it's due: it's not on the face of it a terrible idea, and at any rate it's an idea, the first cogent and reasonably (if not totally) original idea McCain has had on the financial crisis, and probably bolder than anything Obama's offered. On the other hand it cuts against his brand as a cost-cutter and completely contradicts his promise, made just a few minutes earlier, to implement a spending freeze on everything but defense and veterans' affairs. Not to mention that half the Republican Party had a collective aneurysm when they heard it.

Still, there was no game-changing moment, no gaffe, no Pony Tail Guy, no Ayers or Wright. The format sucked, Brokaw was whiny and he chose only questions that had been asked and answered in the previous debate: boffo. McCain needed to shake things up to win; a tie goes to Obama because he's saying more of what people want to hear, and the insta-polls reflected this. More importantly, anything short of stunning victory at this point for McCain equals stunning defeat.

Line of the night goes to Conor Friedersdorf at Culture11: 'As a viewer this wasn’t a very fun debate to watch. How can I connect with a candidate who doesn’t wink at me?'

Some great stuff here, via Krugman.

Seriously, what's the deal with liveblogging? Everybody is doing it. Even Matt felt compelled! It must have started when somebody figured that he needed to fill inches on his blog, so he just posted all of his shitty notes he was taking on his laptop anyway. And from there...a fad was born.

But I ask - who read liveblogs exactly? Do people really want to go back and see what their favorite bloggers had to say the exact instant something was said in the debate? Honestly - nobody is reading during the debate - they're watching the debate! Why not wait the 20 minutes and get a take with a little (possible very little) thought or analysis? I don't give a shit about what Andrew Sullivan thought at 9:22 if it wasn't important enough for him to roll into a sentence at 11:30 later in the evening.

Matt does though. I fear for his sanity.

What Gibbs left out is that Hannity didn't have Andy Martin on his show to disagree with him -- Martin was on his show to support Hannity's contention that Barack Obama has ties with radical Muslims and terrorists. Before that Hannity gave over substantial portions of his radio show to, and was personal friends with, notorious anti-Semite and white supremisist Hal Turner.

But past associations aren't important. Right?

I missed it. Only moment worth remembering, or so the pundits tell me, and I missed it. Perils of watching streaming video on a sub-par connection. Makes me wish I had a teevee -- but then I remember Sean Hannity and the feeling goes away.

I'm tired. Full thoughts on the debate tomorrow.

Nothing exceptional in the debate tonight. Town hall format sucked. Obama looked Presidential. McCain said 'my friends' about 25 times -that is, when he wasn't interrupting the debate with poor one liners and an accompanying smirk. Gaffe of the night was probably McCain suggesting black guy in the audience had never heard of Fannie Mae.

Bottom line: McCain needs to do something to win this election. Debates like this will not help.

10.36pm: Damnit, my connection mostly held out until the last question, which I totally missed. Will try to find it, view it, and post final thoughts a little later. Initially, though, assuming no meltdown or great zinger in the final moments, my impression is that this was a stronger performance by both candidates than the previous debate but also (perhaps predictably) lacked any strong clash or game-changing moments. And with four weeks till election day and a ten-point deficit, that's a pretty big loss for McCain.

10.29pm: The 'talking without preconditions' argument is not a winning one for the Republicans. It's also, y'know, wrong. On the other hand, the surge.

10.25pm: I'll have to look at the transcript again later, but to my ears McCain's answer on the 'Evil Empire' approached Sarah Palin levels of incoherence. Except on the surge.

10.24pm: I don't like either answer on Russia. Georgia in 2008 is Serbia in 1914, and being tied to Serbia didn't work out so well for the Czar. That being said, the surge.

10.18pm: McCain's blinking a lot. I was reading an article recently (I forget where) that pointed out not only that blinking is a subconscious response to lying, but is also subconsciously understood by observers as the behavior of a liar. I would like to add: the surge!

10.16pm: McCain: 'I'll get Osama bin Laden, my friends. I know how to get him. I'll get bin Laden. I promise I'll get him. I know how to get him. I'm not going to telegraph my punches but I know how to get him.' Maybe this is like his secret plan to fix social security? Or to magically end dependence on foreign oil? Or to not force Americans to make tough choices, like, evar? Also, the surge.

10.15pm: Obama done gone make McCain angry. Surge!

10.14pm: McCain's belly-aching about Obama asking for a follow-up after he so obviously lied sounds whiny. The surge.

10.11pm: McCain: 'Senator Obama has said that he would announce that he wants to attack Pakistan.' I mean, this is obviously untrue, but does it even sound true? The surge.

10:07pm: John McCain (maybe slightly paraphrased): 'More than anything with foreign policy we need a cool hand at the tiller.' Not sure that's helping your case, John. Then again, the surge.

10:06pm: 'The McCain Doctrine': the very sound sends chills down my spine. A surge of chills.

10.05pm: I missed most of the first question on foreign policy but my sense is that Obama schooled McCain on being wrong about Iraq once again. I can also only assume that McCain mentioned the surge at some point (probably many many points).

10.01pm: Hair transplants? The audience isn't allowed to laugh, which make McCain's jokes even lamer. Brokaw, however, is loving it.

10.00pm: An hour in, no game-changing moments. Both candidates are stronger and more relaxed in this format, which is more of an improvement for McCain than for Obama. Still, a tie goes to Obama because his message is the one America wants to hear. And, of course, McCain needs more than just a victory in this debate. He needs, well, a game-changing moment.

9.55pm: On mandates McCain has appropriated almost word-for-word Obama's attack on Clinton's health care plan back during the primaries. Of course, Obama's plan only has mandates to require that children receive health care.

9.49pm: McCain refers to the sitting President and Vice-President as 'BushandCheney', the one-word form preferred by Air America hosts and WTO protesters.

9.43pm: John McCain: 'Fixing social security is going to be easy.' Phew. I was starting to think it might take some work; turns out it's so easy that McCain doesn't even have to try to provide a plan, just assert it'll be simple and go back to talking about what a Giant Maverick he is.

9.42pm: Obama manages to go back to taxes and provides the same strong answer he did in the previous debate.

9.38pm: Obama's answer, emphasizing fairness and burden-sharing, will make a lot of conservatives shudder but probably sounds reasonable and appealing to most voters. McCain's attack on Obama's raising taxes on small business sounds as tin-eared tonight as it ever did. He also, as usual, dances pretty close to the line between truth and lie in comparing his tax plan to Obama's. He knows there's no chance for Obama to respond.

9.35pm: To be serious here, for a moment, the sense of entitlement McCain betrayed in his answer to the 'sacrifice' problem -- 'We're Americans! We don't have to give anything up!' -- reflects precisely the kind of thinking that got us into the economic bind we're in now. Obama, on the other hand, is actually answering the question. I've heard his line about Bush telling America to shop in the aftermath of 9/11. I can remember at the time thinking that Bush was hitting the right sentiment; Obama's point, however, actually gives me pause.

9.31pm: McCain will save the economy and eliminate the deficit by curtailing expenditures on overhead projectors.

9.30pm: Best thing that's happened to McCain tonight: while Obama's speaking no split-screen close-ups of McCain's creepy barely-restrained-rage grin.

9.24pm: Brokaw: Which of the three would you prioritize most? McCain: All three! Every pair of eyes in America: Rolling.

9.23pm: I just realized -- off-shore drilling and nuclear power will end America's dependence on foreign oil! Of course!

9.18pm: Did McCain just look Obama in the eye?

9.17pm: Maybe I missed something, but I thought Brokaw wasn't allowed follow-up questions?

9.13pm: McCain attacks Obama on Fannie Mae connections. Michelle Malkin just swooned.

9.10pm: I missed most of Obama's answer to the question. McCain seems relatively confident and relaxed and much friendlier than in the first round.

'My friends' count: 24

That's what she calls it. But she isn't talking about her husband.

Only because Matt brought it up - I have to complain about Obama and NAFTA. Back in March, Obama was smearing NAFTA and free trade in general as he shamelessly pandered to Ohio rust belt types. (Remember those days? Back when Hillary Clinton was a working stiff, and only rich people wanted to vote for Obama?)

Anyway, it cheesed me off then. Some press coverage at the time, here, documented how shamelessly Obama and co. went after Clinton for NAFTA. I remember cringing as Obama attacked Clinton for one of the good things she did - when there was so much else to go after! Obama understands the power of free markets and the necessity of global trade, so it was disappointing - but I was particularly awestruck because I know that Austan Goolsbee, an Obama senior economic advisor, is a proponent of free trade, and of NAFTA in particular (btw,I kind of enjoyed NAFTA-GATE for this reason). It took the shine off of the Obama brand for me - it revealed for me the cynical opportunist within every politician. Not that I think Obama would ever change NAFTA meaningfully, I just think he'll misrepresent his position to scrounge up a few votes. What a shame.

John Hinderaker at Powerline is belly-aching that the statements on the economy in John McCain's speech yesterday were drowned out by the sleazy character attacks in John McCain's speech yesterday. Clearly a liberal conspiracy to focus on Ayers and Wright at the expense of John McCain's politically appealing message on the economy.

Clearly.

T-shirt designs from Teach the Controversy:



(h/t Ronald Bailey)

(Other than The Lion and Gun, of course.)

. . . it should be this piece in the New Yorker, by George Parker, about working class voters in Ohio. I come from a place like this, and it sounds about right to me.

Alex Massie, who shares with me the humiliating and debilitating condition of being a foreigner, doesn't like Obama's protectionist rhetoric even if he knows it's all a crock. I don't like it either, but personal experience tells me it's a particularly big bee in Hobbes's bonnet. So, dude, now's your chance to unload.

Following from an earlier post on team Obama's organizing efforts I thought I'd point you to this article by Al Giordano outlining the Dems' efforts to register voters in Pennsylvania. The short version is that Dem rolls have increased by close to 200,000, about six times the increase in registered Republicans, and they now out-number the GOP in that state by more than a million. Even with a lot of Republican-leaning Clinton Democrats that's still a pretty huge deficit for McCain to work against.

To help you get ready for tonight's debate here's a West Wing classic:



Next scene below the fold.

Sorry, Hobbes.

Steve Benen at Political Animal says of the media's reaction to Rezko/Ayers/Wright:

It's rather amusing to listen to major media figures ponder the question of whether John McCain will be able to successfully change the subject away from the economy and towards controversial figures Barack Obama has met. It's entertaining, of course, because the media figures treat this as something they have nothing to do with -- as if the political discourse is some kind of independent animal, which news outlets are powerless to control.

The reality is, McCain wants the political world to obsess over the three-headed Ayers-Rezko-Wright monster, and it will be successful if the media decides the three-headed monster is suddenly newsworthy. There's no great mystery here. In fact, the pundits' speculation is silly -- if they follow McCain's orders, and talk about what he wants them to talk about, McCain's plan will be a triumph; if not, it won't.

Running a sleazy campaign gives poor McCain sadface says Mike Allen. He's grumpy because he's being forced to be sleazy against his will. He has no control over his campaign and he just hates being sleazy so much!

Grumpiness + Sleaziness = Hero

The best part of the article is the photo of McCain looking bummed out with caption, 'McCain is miserable about having to run a campaign that’s antithetical to his persona.'

Larison has a thoughtful post on Obama's hesitance to challenge the status quo and willingness to cut old allies loose when politically expedient. I think what he says is substantially true, but then one man's political cowardice is another's savvy pragmatism. No doubt Obama is more a conciliator than a firebrand and more an incrementalist than a revolutionary (otherwise he wouldn't be the Democratic nominee for President with a double-digit lead on his Republican opponent); in this he reflects the kind of conservative liberalism that animated the administrations of men like Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Yet it does not necessarily follow that Obama lacks boldly transformational goals; instead it might show in him what Max Weber called a sense of proportion, 'the decisive psychological quality of the politician: his ability to let realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness.'

History has taught us that it's charlatans and fools who think theory can provide a really implementable blueprint for change. In fact, change springs from gentle leadership, consensus-building, and above all the gradual accrual of many small decisions over a very long stretch of time.

America needs a leader who understands that politics is, again in Weber's words, 'a strong and slow boring of hard boards.' It looks like America will soon have one.

Slate and USA Today both post reminders of George H.W. Bush's forced confrontation with his campaign's sleaze in the 1992 town hall debate. The heavily-structured format of this evening's event makes it less likely something like that will happen, but it'd sure be great if it did.

Barack Obama's campaign has an intense focus on metrics that is probably unprecedented in Democratic Presidential campaign history. Their ace in the hole has been their ground game: the majority of Americans are Democrats, a truth that held just as well in the previous two elections as in this one, but the problem is that many of them come from demographics -- youth, the urban poor, ethnic minorities -- that under-participate in voting. If Dems were able to get as many of their supporters to the polls as Republicans we wouldn't have had a GOP President since Eisenhower.

Obama, however, is using his historic candidacy (and his skin color) to inspire people to vote who wouldn't normally, and his campaign's ruthlessly organized ground game is making a huge difference in places like Georgia, where almost 40% of early voters are black. (To compare, they made up about a quarter of the electorate in 2004.) The proportion of African-Americans voting on election day might be smaller; nevertheless, we saw that in primary after primary early voting gave Obama an advantage his opponents often couldn't overcome, and his performance in states with heavy African-American populations exceeded polling by pretty substantial margins.

In other words: It's not inconceivable right now that Georgia is in play, but it is pretty incredible.

Photo reprinted under a Creative Commons license from Isaac Viel.

She only said it for the irony.

Andrew Sullivan has a slightly alarmist reader who thinks America is headed for the brink of tyranny. Sullivan, however, has 'faith in the American people':

They'll see through this to what we need, and make the best choice available. They made the right choice in the 1930s, unlike many other nations. They will make the right choice again. If I didn't have that faith, I wouldn't have the hope I feel.

Will Wilkinson provides us with the following very comforting graph.



See? Even if we have another Great Depression everything'll be fine in another fifteen years or so, assuming of course that we have a worldwide war necessitating massive state investment in vital industries and the deployment of millions of previously unemployed young Americans to die in foreign countries. And let's not forget that the bubonic plague cleared up that whole labor oversupply problem afflicting Europe in the fourteenth century, clearing way for the Renaissance a century or so later. So, y'know, bright side and all that.

For months Republicans, and Clinonites before them, have been accusing Barack Obama of being the head of a messianic cult of personality. But watching McCain and Palin rile up their supporters to shout 'Terrorist!' and 'Kill him!' and verge on physically attacking reporters is genuinely creepy.

Keep these people away from beer halls.

(Video below the fold.)



Photo reprinted under a Creative Commons license from Don Robson.

So Jay Cost over at NRO suggests that Obama's thin resume allows Republicans to define him for the American people. Sure. He then goes on to say:

With the mentioning of William Ayers, the GOP has just now begun the process of offering its alternative definition of the junior senator from Illinois. It waited until October because, as I noted last week, anywhere between 20% and 30% of the electorate is now making up its mind. This is the time to begin this process.

Will McCain launch a character assault against Barack Obama tonight? My guess is no: the Democrats are successfully defining him as that crotchety old geezer who lives down the street and only opens his door to chase trick-or-treating little bastards off his porch with a broom. So he'd be playing right into their hands. Most people have heard his charges before anyway -- at least the ones about Wright, and those came with videotape -- and the six in ten Americans who believe we're on the verge of a depression frankly don't give a damn. McCain would have to make a pretty huge revelation for the top story out of the debate not to be 'McCain's an asshole', and as I've suggested below his campaign's decision to pull out of Michigan argues against that possibility. Besides, if the Obama campaign knew of any potentially startling revelations I think they'd have been dumped on us some Friday afternoon in the March/April corridor, just like a certain radical preacher I know.

Who's happy about these character attacks? RedState. Michelle Malkin. The Weekly Standard. But McCain already has their votes. Meanwhile, the rest of America, including many conservatives -- David Weigel, Jim Geraghty, Allahpundit, Rod Dreher, Ross Douthat, and of course Andrew Sullivan -- don't want to hear it. 2008 isn't a year where playing to the base will work.

Granted, it doesn't look like the McCain campaign gets it, but after the flack he took for poor eye contact in the last round I assume they'll be cautious about raising his negatives this time. Better to leave that stuff to Palin.

A few nights ago I titled a post 'The Gloves Come Off' (I was too tired to be clever) but now I'm officially calling a moratorium on use of the phrase here at The Lion and Gun until November 5th. Seriously, if I read one more news item with that phrase the gloves are gonna--

You know.

(h/t Oliver Willis)

What does Barack Obama's campaign strategy reveal about his thinking?

While a Presidential election may be a zero-sum game, the decision to smear resembles a Prisoner's Dilemma: if neither side goes negative there can be an uplifting campaign of ideas which increases the political capital of both winner and loser. If both sides go negative the electoral results may be a wash but the political process is debased and both candidates have their reputations severely tarnished. Yet if one side manages to broadside the other with little or no effective retaliation a path to victory might be cleared: thus the incentive to defect.

In his now-classic work The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist and game theoritician Robert Axelrod examined a number of competing strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and determined that the most successful and robust, which he called 'Tit for Tat', cooperated initially and then repeated whatever action the other player had taken on the previous turn.

Axelrod identified in Tit for Tat four properties of success. First, it avoided unnecessary conflict by cooperating for as long as possible; second, it was provocable, always responding with swift and equal force to another party's defection; thirdly, it was forgiving and willing to cooperate in spite of past defection; and, finally, it displayed a clarity of behavior that encouraged cooperation and discouraged defection.

We can see this strategy clearly employed in Obama's campaign. Axelrod and Plouffe, Biden and Michelle, Obama's media surrogates and of course Obama himself, all have been reluctant to go on the attack (often to the chagrin of the Kossacks among us). As many times as the gloves have come off, beginning almost a year ago, they've usually quickly gone back on. Throughout Obama has maintained his almost preternatural cool. In debates, in speeches, in rallies and ads, when many lesser politicians might savage their opponents, Obama has generally stood back and kept his eye on issues and his message, where possible, upbeat. Even after the (surprisingly large) Palin/convention bounce in the first half of September Obama's advisers insisted that they were satisfied with internal state polling and registration efforts and refused to go on the offensive. They didn't act like they were in second place because, of course, they weren't.

And yet nobody would accuse his campaign of being gun-shy. They had their response to Clinton's first '3AM' ad literally within hours. They pounced on McCain's Sunni/Shia mix-up. In the past few days they've produced hard-hitting spots on McCain's plan to tax health insurance and accused him of being erratic and out of touch. With the exception of the weeks surrounding Jeremiah Wright's March roll-out they've rarely found themselves on the defensive for long.

This is made all the more remarkable by watching the thirteen-minute Keating Five 'documentary' the campaign released online a few hours ago. Its production values suggest that it's been in the can for a while, but Obama's strategists were careful not to jump the gun. They waited until they were well ahead and McCain's campaign (almost inevitably) resorted to guilt-by-association tactics; now they've struck back hard. The message is clear: you mess with us, you'll get back as good as you give. McCain has as much as or more to lose from this most recent gambit and Obama is now free to bring up the Republican's own salubrious associations without significantly undermining the promise to bring a new kind of politics.

The analogy is imperfect. There is, for example, a clear end point to the game -- election day -- which should, in theory, encourage defection from day one. Obviously there are plenty of other factors which strongly influence campaign tactics. Nevertheless, I'm confident that history will show Obama's strategy to be as winning as it was in Robert Axelrod's study. Perhaps more importantly, it gives us a clue as to the way an Obama administration would work, not just politically but in terms of American Grand Strategy in the wider world. It reflects the kind of pragmatic realism that's attracted conservatives like Andrew Sullivan to Obama's cause. And after eight years of ideological and idealist foreign policy it's exactly what America needs.

It's getting really, really, bad out there.

On the bright side it gives us new occasion to mock McCain Senior Economic Advisor Kevin Hassett, who wrote...and you can't make this stuff up...Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market .

Matt took Bob Bar to task for some post hoc ergo proptor hoc nonsense below. Let me posit that if Barr is riding the Post Hoc Express, then Larry Kudlow is the conductor. I've been waiting for the right moment to expose Kudlow for this piece of shoddy analysis. I think this is the best part:

In a dramatic move yesterday President Bush removed the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. Today, at a news conference, Bush repeated his new position, and slammed the Democratic Congress for not removing the congressional moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August delivery plunged $9.26, or 6.3 percent, almost immediately as Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.

Now isn’t this interesting?

Obama and the Dems have had a field day tagging McCain with the '3rd Bush term' label. They've been so successful, that the left-of-center Liberal Party in Canada has aped their tactics. Which isn't to say that Liberals are associating an opposing candidate with an unpopular outgoing leader - they are associating an opposing candidate with the policies and politics of George Bush! Take a look at this ad, it's basically an exact copy of some sort of anti-McCain ad you've been seeing for months, complete with the photo of the two looking like best chums:



The Bush brand is so toxic that it's poisoning foreign elections. There's a whole site of it here.

Joe Klein has been one of the strongest barometers of the media's estrangement from former flame John McCain, gradually shifting from genuine admiration to scathing dislike. Today he hits us with a real humdinger. The opening salvo gives an idea of what follows:

I'm of two minds about how to deal with the McCain campaign's further descent into ugliness. Their strategy is simple: you throw crap against a wall and then giggle as the media try to analyze the putresence in a way that conveys a sense of balance: "Well, it is bull-pucky, but the splatter pattern is interesting..." which, of course, only serves to get your perverse message out. I really don't want to be a part of that. But...every so often, we journalists have a duty to remind readers just how dingy the McCain campaign, and its right-wing acolytes in the media (I'm looking at you, Sean Hannity) have become--especially in their efforts to divert public attention from the economic crisis we're facing. And so inept at it: other campaigns have decided that their only shot is going negative, but usually they don't announce it, as several McCain aides have in recent days--there's no way we can win on the economy, so we're going to go sludge-diving.

This year's award for most ridiculously-over-the-top headline goes to Bill Dyer for posting this gem Saturday at Hugh Hewitt's blog:

NYT minimizes and conceals both extent and seriousness of Obama's multi-year ties to terrorist Ayes over multi-million-dollar conspiracy to radicalize American education

Wowsers. Sounds serious.

Photo reprinted under a Creative Commons license from Bob Barr for President

I don't mean to tar the entire Libertarian brand -- Hobbes might leave a severed horse's head in my bed if I did -- but Bob Barr just jumped on the Post Hoc Express over at HuffPo (not exactly preaching to the choir). His logic is impeccable if you go for that sort of thing: Congress passes bailout bill, stock markets tank, therefore. . .

Look, say what you will about the (de)merits of the bailout, and this is more Hobbes's area of expertise than mine, but I gather that the current Dow downturn is related to a persistent lack of credit, not some morning-after rejection of Congress's rescue. Anyway, none of the Treasury's new funds have been disbursed yet, so maybe we should actually wait until the new law is implemented before deeming it a failure.

Matt Yglesias has a post comparing weekend grosses of Bill Maher's anti-religious doc Religulous and David Zucker's right-wing 'comedy' An American Carol, both of which opened this weekend. Maher's per-theater average beat Zucker's nearly three times over, which leads Yglesias to conclude that movie-going audiences lean to the left.

That's certainly the case with urban art house cinema goers, and it's also true that movie audiences tend to be younger (and thus more inclined to Democratic politics) than consumers of television news. Nevertheless, the argument is overstated, and if the relevant metric is per-theater average then turn the calendar back one week and watch Kirk Cameron's evangelical Fireproof school the other two. Seriously, American Carol's box office failure has little to do with its politics and a lot to do with its trailers being almost miraculously unfunny.

(To wit, averages were $8,111 for Cameron, $6,972 for Maher, and $2,325 for Zuzker. Figures from Box Office Guru.)

Here's why McCain wants to talk about Ayers and Wright: the Dow dropped 400 this morning, taking it below 10,000. As long as McCain seems to think people are more worried about angry preachers and ex-radicals than their homes and their jobs, both campaigns will be tag-teaming the idea that he's out-of-touch. It's bad politics. Hell, it's just bad.

It used to be that a pseudo intellectual could use the word 'meme' and have some quantum of certainty that those with whom he was speaking were rubes who knew not of the viral propagation of cultural phenomenon. But no more! Ever since David Brooks dropped 'meme' all over his column in August I've felt like I've been hearing it everywhere.

Could it be that 'meme' was becoming cliché? It got me to thinking that 'meme' could be the next 'meta' - an obnoxious word whose use makes me want to kick the speaker/writer in the groin. So I did some analysis - was the use of 'meme' really exploding as I suspected? Was it possible that 'memes' might even be supplanting 'metas' as a cliché of choice for the scurrilous popinjay? Here's what Google Trends told me about memes and metas:



Searches last week for 'meme' are at 230% of their Feb 2004 level, while searches for 'meta' are only 73%. (Note that this data is for the United States only, as numbers from France and Turkey throw off the numbers some what given that 'meme' is both a French* and Turkish word meaning something completely different). But meme lovers everywhere should not despair, the use of the term is still appears to be in its infancy - here are the figures for absolute search:


Meta is still searched for at 3.6x the rate meme is. But watch out, that ratio was 11.8x only 4 years ago. So you heard it here first, 'meme' is becoming cliché - so wear it out while people will still think you're intelligent. In a couple of years you'll just be another jerk talking about doing a meta analysis of memes. And for those astute readers, yes, I have already broken one of our inaugural promises. Sorry.


*If we're going to get technical about it, a lot of those US searches are French language as well. But I would think that the French language 'meme' would dilute the trend rather than exaggerate it - so I stick by my hypothesis.

This election's going Obama's way. Sure, there's a month left, but he's been building a three-week head of steam and Sarah Palin's shaky debate performance confounded the punditocracy's game of expectations limbo by failing to stanch any bleeding. If current numbers hold for another week or ten days it'd take a pretty stunning collapse in support for Obama to lose the election: America would have to be hit by bin Laden or Obama found in bed (literally) with Jeremiah Wright.

So Republicans are losing their minds. They picked their guy, a guy a lot of them weren't happy with but a guy who, for precisely that reason, was able to keep it close almost until now. And that's a remarkable feat; with President and party brand at about an eight on a scale from one to Jeffrey Dahmer, the GOP's only hope before McCain was a nation with Battered Wife's Syndrome. And now what have they got left?

There's no ace up their sleeve. Back when the Dem nomination was sewn up nutbag Clintonite Larry 'No Quarter' Johnson sent out a ripple of concern about a purported video of Michelle Obama railing on 'whitey' which was 'in Republican possession' and always about to be produced next week. But a campaign that has a racially polarizing October surprise doesn't abandon Michigan, of all places, when that state is only a few points below their national average. Besides, Sarah Palin's comments this weekend make it pretty clear which way the campaign is going -- back over the heavily-trod ground of Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers.

Obama's campaign, meanwhile, is aggressively attacking McCain on health care and taking every opportunity to quote the (many many) journalists that have portrayed McCain's recent campaign actions as being erratic and out-of-touch. In this the Obama campaign is none-too-subtly linking McCain's performance with his age; it's a message that probably has more traction after McCain's campaign suspension stunt went over like a lead balloon. And today, as we saw in a previous post, Obama's opening an assault on McCain's own past associations, namely disgraced banker Charles Keating. As Ben Smith puts it, this is not a case of 'guilt by association' so much as 'guilt by guilt'.

Nevertheless, while it has the virtue of novelty in this campaign, as well as somewhat more substance behind it, camp Obama's response might not be necessary. While the McCain campaign probably feels it has no choice but to go negative, that thinking is skewed: the real choice isn't between going negative or losing, it's between going negative and losing or not going negative and losing. McCain needs a game-changer. Re-treading Wright and Ayers isn't it.

Why not? A few reasons. First of all, and perhaps most importantly, past attempts to go negative haven't really hurt Obama very much. McCain's celebrity ads helped to chip away at Obama's lead by a few points over the course of several weeks, but right now McCain needs something more dramatic. Ayers and Wright have greater potential to unsettle white America, I suppose, but there's also a sense of 'been there, done that'. Even most voters who weren't paying attention back in March and April know who Jeremiah Wright is, and as Nate Silver notes, barring some stunning new video or revelations, this new-found fascination with Obama's old associates will be campaign-led, not news-led, which could well backfire.

Then there's the messenger. After the debate Sarah Palin has emerged as McCain's attack dog, but attack dog politics only works if the attack dog has credibility. People by now feel like they know Barack Obama and a lot of people trust him; they simply aren't going to believe the word of a widely-ridiculed hockey mom who's been better for SNL's ratings than for John McCain's. Maybe a bit of Obama's recent support, probably a little soft, can be persuaded away, but as with almost anything Sarah Palin says it looks right now like she's really preaching to the base: the attacks will energize the anti-Obama vote but that's a vote the GOP already has; for every marginal Obama supporter they win they're likely to lose two moderates frustrated with negative politics.

That's the final point. The only reason John McCain managed to keep the race close until recently was because of his brand; his 2000 campaign manager Mike Murphy argues that the current campaign's focus on tactics over strategy has harmed that advantage. This final bout of negative campaigning could destroy whatever shards of McCain's once-sterling reputation remain.

Campaign strategy is fundamentally about messaging: voters have to know what their vote for a candidate means. Hillary Clinton's major mistake was to choose the wrong message -- Experience -- and then to abandon it after the first taste of defeat and spend the next two months searching for a new one. McCain, too, has been struggling to define himself, from steady hand at the wheel to impulsive reformer, free market Reaganite to populist Teddy Roosevelt. Now, it seems, his campaign is abandoning any further attempts and giving itself over to the notion that this election is all about Obama.

But an election all about Obama is an election John McCain can't win.