Why does the VP pick matter so much this time?

Surely there’s something of a perfect storm surrounding John McCain’s gimmicky decision to put Sarah Palin on the ticket.  There’s John’s advanced years, but knowing the presidency is a high risk occupation no matter who sits in the big chair (they don’t assign Secret Service protection to just anyone), that seems the least of the problem.

A lot has been said about the pick reflecting on McCain’s judgment, but I think that’s overrated as well.  Not that it doesn’t show McCain is impetuous and often acts before thinking — it does.  But we had ample opportunity to see McCain’s seat-of-the-pants decision making style without having Sarah Palin’s obvious inadequacies hammering the point home.

It really comes down to this.  Palin matters, and matters in a profoundly negative way if you’re a fan of either McCain or Palin, because she’s so ridiculously obnoxious.

When she came out of the box, echoing Rudi 9ui11iani and slamming community organizers, she pissed a lot of folks off.  She’s been pissing more and more of us off every day.

You can compare her to quite a few VP nominees who weren’t perceived as ready for the job on day one.  Quayle and Agnew are obvious examples who didn’t prevent their boss from getting elected.  Thomas Eagleton didn’t exactly help McGovern, true.  But he didn’t spend too much time on the campaign trail undermining the party’s chances against a nearly unbeatable Nixon reelection machine in 1972.  In fact, Eagleton was only on the ticket a couple of weeks and was gone by August 1st. He was way down the list of reasons McGovern didn’t win. 

Besides, no one ever said Eagleton didn’t know how to do the job, just that his electro-shock therapy sessions and illegal prescription for Thorazine might be reason to be concerned — you might say.

Well, you might.

Okay, he was fucking nutz, clinically so.  Dangerously so.  Probably more troublesome than Caribou Barbie — but she’s wasn’t drummed out of the ticket like she should have been, like Eagleton was.

No, Sarah is not suffering from any mental health problems.  Her delusions are a deliberate result of religious fervor, rejection of the scientific method, political opportunism and the usual sociopathic narcissism endemic to most compassionate conservatives of the last few decades.  Oh, and her complete ignorance of the Constitution and founding principles of this country add to the perception that she’s a complete whack-job.

But that’s not the whole story.  It’s a personality thing.  She’s irritatingly prideful in her role as smear merchant in chief.  You can tell she delights in attaching someone with a foreign sounding name to Barack Hussein Obama, with no clue whether the guy is a bad guy or not.  It doesn’t matter to her and the rump of a party she’s destined to lead because they simply don’t associate with people whose names don’t sound like “real America.”

It’s obnoxious.  The whole race-baiting, anti-intellectual, hypocritical, lying bag of horse dung package is obnoxious.  It’s not “mavericky” to call a 4% tax hike on the richest Americans “socialism,” it’s obnoxious.  When you govern the nation’s largest welfare state, you got some nerve bitching about spreading the wealth.  When you’re married to a guy who belongs to a political party dedicated to removing one of the states from the union, you are an obnoxious twit to presume you know which parts of the rest of the United States of America are “real” or patriotic enough to tolerate your obnoxious presence.

So as we wade through mountains of post election rationalization for why John McCain lost against the most impressive political campaign history has ever seen, bumping again and again into the Palin syndrome; just remember how obnoxious she is, how much she pisses so many people off, how many women she insults merely for being the token candidate she is — and how few, how very few of us “other” Americans can ever imagine wanting to do beers with her.

Jack Turduckhen, reporting live from Dubuque, Iowa. The McCain campaign has decided to “Let Sarah be Sarah”, and she is here now with me. Sarah, you are very strong on crime and punishment. Alaska doesn’t have a Death Penalty. What is your position on The Death Penalty?

If the legislature passed a death penalty law, I would sign it.
I support adequate funding for a strong public safety presence in Alaska. Feeling safe in our communities is something we cannot accept any compromise on. This includes policing in all its forms, the court system, prosecutors and corrections. If the legislature passed a death penalty law, I would sign it. We have a right to know that someone who rapes and murders a child or kills an innocent person in a drive by shooting will never be able to do that again.

You are opposed to abortion. You believe life begins at conception, and an abortion is the premeditated murder of an unborn child. The premeditated murder of any child is a heinous crime, and the murderer should get the Death Penalty, right?

You Betcha!

I guess the only question that remains is “How will you execute women that have abortions?” Electric chair? Gas Chamber? Lethal injection? Public hanging with hordes of Christians chanting “Kill Baby, Kill!”?

Zencomix

Maybe I’m just sick of being sick since I’ve been dealing with a chest cold for over a week now.  Maybe it’s because I already voted, so in my subconscious I know none of the remaining flourishes of the campaigns make any difference to me personally.  Maybe, no … without a doubt John McCain, Sarah Palin, their surrogates, spokespeople, bloggers and plumbers have fried my very last nerve.

Four more days.  One long weekend and we will finally have elected Senator Obama.  In just over a hundred hours from now, the polls will begin closing and John McCain will leave us Ohio voters alone, never to return.  Seriously, the guy is like a stalker.

The good news is, if the CNN poll of polls is any indication (and who really knows), he’s not making any new friends in the Buckeye State.  McCain’s strategy of swamping Ohio with his presence — chasing down every contrarian in the State who either gets some secret pleasure in confounding pollsters, or is so completely and deliberately uninformed they really should be disqualified from voting — is just pissing off the rest of us who’ve made up our minds.

I hear Obama’s on his way back here too, just to rub our noses in the fact that Ohio, as usual, is home to the most fickle voters on the planet.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m delighted that unlike John Kerry in 2004, the Democrats have not given up on us, but I wish Arnold Schwarzenegger would.  Of course, it’s always a pleasure to welcome Bill Clinton to Toledo, but he wasn’t here so much (it seems) to flush out more Obama votes as to allay our fears that Ohio could be lost and turn the scales to McCain if the polls are wrong and Obama doesn’t hold on to his slight lead.

During both of his public speeches in Ohio, the former president pointed out how crucial the states’s 20 electoral votes are for a Republican win on Tuesday.
“In all those elections since 1836, not a single, solitary Republican has ever been elected without carrying Ohio,” he said in Toledo.
“Once in a great while, but rarely, the Democrats have eased in without carrying Ohio, but that’s rare … the point is that you have this election and the future of our country in your hands.”

Thanks Bill, that makes us all feel so much better.

No wonder Al Gore didn’t put this guy out on the stump. If it isn’t about him, and campaigning for Hillary was all about him as well, his heart just isn’t in it all the way.

If you vote like the duck and campaign like the duck, people start thinking you’re a waterfowl, too.

And if you add a goony bird to the ticket, they’re likely to identify you as a fupped duck.

When the conservative Economist endorses the Democrat, you might be wise to note it’s most damning words:

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.

If only the real John McCain had been running

That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.

Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.

McCain’s transformation over his life from eagle to hawk to duck certainly calls into question three central wonderings: what do conservatives conserve anymore? If McCain can’t even find any McCain to conserve, was the old McCain just a myth? Which McCain is the quack?

Per RCP, now … and then.

Now… Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby 10/27 - 10/29, 1179 LV, 50-43 Obama (+7)
Then… Reuters/Zogby 10/29 - 10/31, 1208 LV, 48-47 Bush (+1) … and Bush won by 6.5%

Now… GWU/Battleground 10/23 - 10/29, 1000 LV, 49-46 Obama (+3)
Then… GWU/Battleground 10/31 - 11/1, 1000 LV, 50-46 Bush (+4)

Now… ABC News/Wash Post 10/25 - 10/28, 1316 LV, 52-44 Obama (+8)
Then… ABC News/Wash Post 10/28 - 10/31, 2904 LV, 49-48 Bush (+1)

Now… IBD/TIPP 10/24 - 10/28, 894 LV, 47-44 Obama (+3)
Then… TIPP 10/30 - 11/1, 1041 LV, 50.1-48.0 Bush (+2.1)

Now… FOX News 10/28 - 10/29, 924 LV 47-44 Obama (+3)
Then… FOX News 10/30 - 10/31, 1200 LV 46-48 Kerry (+2)

Now… Gallup (Traditional) 10/27 - 10/29, 1825 LV, 50-45 Obama (+5)
Now… Gallup (Expanded) 10/27 - 10/29, 2437 LV, 51-44 Obama (+7)
Then… CNN/USA/Gallup 10/29 - 10/31, 1573 LV, 49-49 (TIE)

Depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, 2004’s results show that either the pollsters underestimated the strength of the poll leader by 2.5% to 8.5%, or they undercounted the Republican vote by those margins. Which means either Obama’s headed for a landslide win, or he’s going to win by 1.5% or lose by as much as 5.5% if one of those pollster’s margin of error is the same as before.

That’s what you can depend on from most pollsters: confusion because they’re wrong. The most accurate of those pollsters last time was GWU/Battleground and if they err the same this time, Obama will win by 0.5% or by 5.5%. TIPP was second most accurate. Its same error would have Obama winning by 7.4% or losing by 1.4%.

Confusion. And since all have upgraded their models, their error rates will differ. So what’s an analyst to do?

Mark Blumenthal displays the latest trends which shows little or no narrowing of Obama’s lead.

Steve M. explains that Fox News has cooked its numbers to display a closer race than the other pollsters have… except for TIPP and GWU/Battleground, who were closest in 2004.

Nate Silver directly questions TIPP’s current methodology while asserting that it’ll be harder for every pollster to deliver results as accurate as 2004’s. Yet he also indicates McCain’s too far behind in the states that count to make up the margin he needs to win, barring some external event.

Still. Confusing.

So what can we say for certain about what the polls tell us?

Simple: go vote. Your vote might make the difference, especially in one of the most contested states. I mailed in my ballot last night so it should be recorded on Monday.

Have you voted? Let there be no excuse this time to prevent yur vote this time. If all new registrants vote, there’ll be a Democratic president. If they don’t show up, Sarah Palin could be our president. Which only guarantees that in the next four years, you won’t get attacked by Bullwinkle.

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Friends Of Life

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Exxon remains the dominant economic giant of the world. Which is why it has a huge say in our foreign policy decisions and why it’s legally forestalled the damages it has to pay for the Exxon Valdez disaster for so many years.

And the oddest part is, when oil prices rise, the stockmarket indexes usually rise, too. Despite the fact that high oil prices ravage consumer spending and eventually hurt the economies of all but the oil-producing states.

I remain convinced and admittedly biased that Big Oil requires another serious trustbusting to rein in its outsized, anti-Democratic political influence. Call that any label you want to but I call it pro-life. Too many have died to satisfy the raw material needs of Big Oil. And too many have suffered illness and economic hardship from Big Oil doin’s.

Some call it just a wonder of free-market capitalism. Because lives remain secondary to the economic bottom line. Somebody should tell Elizabeth On-The-Dole, if you want to define ‘godless’, start with the soulless Exxon executive board.

Larry Sabato’s current election projections are pretty much a mirror of my own on the Presidential and Senate contests. My differences?

I’m still not convinced NC will come in for Obama. Nor am I sure MT and ND will come in for McCain. And I believe IN will go for Obama.

In the Senate, I expect McConnell will be upset, though it’s hard to be filter an objective assessment from my wishful thinking. And I’m skeptical that Al Franken will surpass his capacity to shoot himself in the foot.

But the thing I remain most confident of is that the turnout by voters under 30 will continue to disappoint. Presidential campaigns that depend on that demographic alone have always been losses and I’ve seen no logical reason to anticipate this particular generation will prove markedly different than any other. At best, a modest increase, perhaps 3%, is all that’s likely to occur.

Fortunately, Team Obama targeted every demographic so he’ll likely win easily anyway. If he’s somehow upset, then barring massive voter fraud, the blame will fall mostly on the young.

Yes, it’ll be a tough pill to swallow for all the activists from that demographic who’ve tirelessly worked for a progressive victory. But it’s a pill many have swallowed since the first time the young were aggressively recruited, in 1968. It’s largely understandable as the group is less vested as homeowners and taxpayers and parents.

That was the chief reason I initially doubted that Obama would ever get this far. The young did make a difference in the primaries, to their credit. They could make the difference still in numerous downticket races, but sadly, most have other priorities. Which just goes to prove that too many of them really aren’t as smart as they think they are.

Yeah, I’m sure I sound like the grumpy old guy yelling “hey, get offa my lawn!” Except that I’d love to be proven wrong. I’d love to feel certain Obama will win. But he remains at risk because too many young lack follow through. They expect others to deliver their victories.

In a year, when unemployment nears 10%, I hope they don’t have to regret their carelessness. If they don’t deliver Obama, then yeah, I’ll be keeping them immature adults offa my lawn.

Just a taste.

New rules:

I will stop calling George Bush a jackass when he stops calling me a terrorist: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

I will stop calling John McCain an ass when he stops calling Barack
Obama a socialist at every dog and pony show on the Straight Talk
Express tour.

I will stop calling Sarah Palin a bitch when she stops calling Obama
a terrorist sympathizer.  And I will stop calling Sarah Palin a bitch
when she stops calling the parts of the country where I don’t live more
Pro-American than the part of the country where I do live.    And I
will definitely stop calling Sarah Palin a bitch when she stops acting
like a bitch.

Andy tells us Helen is 82 years young, lives in Texas, isn’t too fond of the blond bimbo on The View either, and gives great blog.

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MEANWHILE, back on the frontlines of The War on Halloween…

MEANWHILE, Jon Swift shines the kitchen light on the Cockroaches of Conservative Thought. It’s nearly a week later, and I’m still laughing at this one. Quiz time! Who said it…

“You know, just because the thing I saw wasn’t there doesn’t mean there wasn’t something there that I didn’t see,”

…Donald Rumsfeld or Ann Althouse?

The “John McCain: Apocalypse Now Redux” T-Shirt can be purchased at The Zencomix Online Market.

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Pew Research’s report today indicates dwindling support for McCain but I think it’s missing closing week trends.

Zogby, which began as an outlier, showed Obama’s support increased from a low of 47.1 -45.2 on October 7th, to a peak of 52.2 -40.3 on October 22nd. But with the debates concluded and McCain narrowing his closing argument to the longstanding GOP standard of being better on taxes and spending, he’s whittled that down to 49-44.7, a 4.3 pt race as of polling completed yesterday.

Yet a 4% margin in the final week has won every race in many decades except one: 1980. So in itself, that margin is no cause for concern. And tightening in the final week has always been expected by pollsters and election historians. So the trend doesn’t mean it’s time to worry either.

Together, however, both factors made me take notice. So I began checking trends and margins per other pollsters. Here’s what I found:

Gallup still has it at 51-44, but that’s 5 pts closer in a week.

ABC/WaPo has it at 52-45, a 4 pt narrowing.

Diageo/Hotline has it at 50-42, just 1 pt closer.

DKos/R2000 has it at 50-43, 5 pts closer.

And Rasmussen, the most reliable national trend pollster, has it at 51-46, a 3 pt narrowing.

ARG, a Republican pollster, has the race widening by 1 pt, now at 50-45.

So a narrowing between 3% and 5% has occurred with outlier polls removed. And only Zogby is showing Obama below 50%, at 49%. Zogby’s also the only major pollster calling it as narrow as 4.3%. Even the Republican ARG says it’s 5%. But then, so does the very reliable Rasmussen.

That gives me pause because I felt Obama would hold the line at 6%, after the narrowing. But let me add, it draws my concern but not any worry because tomorrow’s as close as McCain is likely to get in the national polling. What’s clear is the following Republican strategies are now being employed:

1) McCain’s pulled his central campaign back from several battleground states. Its focus is down to the three richest in electoral votes: FL, PA and OH.

2) Palin still gets sent to a few others where it’s felt she might have slightly more pull than McCain, but she’s also showing up in PA/OH a lot, too.

3) The RNC has been picking up some of the defense in states where McCain has slipped recently. The most visible of these is MT, which turned blue in the last in-state poll there. Previously popular among Libertarians, both McCain and Palin are finding Ron Paul more popular there. And they’re willing to let MT’s 3 EVs go.

4) The RNC also began running a Jeremiah Wright ad in the big 3 states that McCain must now count on. So the race card is being played as long anticipated, but McCain will try to claim he’s not authorizing it, which is a weak argument at best. Still, if he continues to deliver his economy-only message while the RNC does its best to draw the racist vote in, we have to weigh what the worst case could be if McCain succeeds in winning all three.

So for starters, revisit my state-by-state projections from three days ago. Summarizing, I indicated Obama had 255 safe EVs already. And nothing in any poll anywhere provides any evidence that has changed towards McCain.

I projected that Obama had a sufficient lead to win in NM, CO, NV and VA. I called the very close races for MO , OH and IN as likely for Obama. I rated NH, OH, IN, NC and FL too close to call. And MT and GA were Leans McCain tossups. And ND I called a mystery.

Do the polls suggest any of those have changed in the past three days? Yes. VA has shifted to safe Obama.

The reliable Rasmussen says 51-47, a narrowing of 6 pts in the past 10 days. But SUSA, the most accurate state pollster, now says 52-43, which is only 1 pt narrower in the same ten day period. PPP concurs with SUSA in that period. And Zogby has it as a 7% contest. Without campaigning there, there’s just no way McCain can close a 4% to 9% gap.

Add VA’s 13 EVs to 255 and he’s only 2 votes shy of a victory. Which means McCain HAS TO get PA, or his other option is to win every other remaining state. And despite modest narrowing of the race, there’s no poll showing PA closer than a 9 pt Obama win.

Te only Kerry state McCain still has a shot at is NH, but that only puts Obama 6 EVs shy of a win. Every other undecided state except MT and ND provide the margin of victory in that event.

Which means McCain must win FL, OH, NC, GA, IN, NH, CO, NM, NV, and either MT or ND, to upset Obama. And here’s what’s happening in each of them.

FL: a 5 pt shift here, per Rasmussen, in 7 days. But favoring Obama, who now leads by 4%. A very ominous sign for McCain.

OH: a 6 pt shift here, per Rasmussen, too. Also for Obama, who now leads by 4%. SUSA concurs exactly in the current poll, though showing a 1% narrowing over 13 days. These two results from his three most contested states, has to be discouraging for McCain because now he has 6 days to get at least 4% from both. And neither trend favors him.

NC: the shift to this tossup state and current trend now makes it lean slightly McCain.

GA: still favors McCain but the trend is all Obama’s.

IN: SUSA shifted 7 pts for Obama from 10/1 to 10/22, and has him leading 49-45. Zogby says it’s 50-44 for McCain but with no prior poll, can’t define a trend. Thus it remains uncertain.

NH: Rasmussen has McCain closing from a 10 pt gap to 4. An in state pollster has Obama winning it by a huge margin, however.

CO has narrowed by 1 pt, but Obama retains at least a 4 pt lead and still carries 50%

NV: mixed results, but still looks like a 4% lead for Obama.

MT: an in-state poll now gives Obama the lead here.

ND Too little data to guess.

NM: needs a poll more recent than 10/13 but still looks safe for Obama. And with polls in his home state of AZ now narrowing to 6%, 4% and 2%, with that slippage attributed to the Latino vote, McCain just isn’t going to win the most Latino state in the country.

With Obama getting NM’s 5 EVs and VA’s 13, if McCain gets NH - and everything else - he wins by the smallest possible margin of 270-268. But as I noted, OH and FL have trended away from him and Obama leads by at least 4% in both of those AND CO, NV and NH. Plus he now leads in MT.

Finally comes the kickers. Undecided voters start choosing in the final 5 days, typically. And the night before that, Obama’s half-hour ad is set to run. At the national level, that should stop further narrowing. Those undecideds often favor perceived winners or go with obvious trends. With a 4% gap nationwide, Obama should get AT LEAST 50% of the undecideds. And McCain will only get about a day and a half to counter Obama’s ad before the majority of those undecideds pour in.

If that ad’s a hit, he won’t be able to stop Obama’s closing momentum.

And let’s not forget how many voters have ALREADY voted, before the gaps closed.

So as I said, the race now has me concerned but not worried. Despite his Herculean closing effort, too much remains against McCain to pull off a miracle finish. And there’s a vast amount of economic data due on Thursday and Friday, so there’s little to indicate any positive news after tomorrow’s interest rate cut by the Fed.

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Today, Sarah Palin helped lock up the endorsement of Joe The Felon, but curious readers are wondering if Alaska allows Felons to vote! One site says “Currently ex-felons in Alaska can vote only upon completion of sentence, including probation and parole.”

But this other site says “Those convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude under either state or federal law lose the right to vote in all elections while they are under sentence,including both the incarceration and probation or parole segments of a sentence.” If he hasn’t yet been sentenced, can he still vote even though he’s a convicted felon?