Nine days out

I just had to get this McCain quote up for posterity.
If Obama wins, McCain says "the nation" will be defeated, and he's got Obama right where he wants him. Hilarious.
From the BBC:

"I will never allow this nation to be defeated ... my friends, we've got them just where we want them. We love being the underdog and we're going to win!"

Nine days to go.
Fivethirtyeight.com has Obama projected to win 348 electoral votes. 270 are needed to win.
McCain's "master plan" is tragic in its hopelessness. He is going "all in" in Pennsylvania to get its 27 EVs, which will serve to partially counteract some of his other expected state losses.

The problem is that McCain has never led in any reliable polling in that state. The closest he ever got was a tie on Rasmussen 9/14, which looks like an outlier in retrospect. Subsequent Rasmussen polling showed a steady increase in Obama's PA support:

• 9/21 Obama +3
• 9/24 Obama +4
• 9/28 Obama +8
• 10/6 Obama + 13

Bear in mind that Rasmussen has generally been showing lower levels of Obama support in PA than most other pollsters. For example, SurveyUSA (whom I consider to be a Republican-leaning pollster) showed Obama as +15 on 10/6 when Rasmussen showed +13.
On 10/22, SurveyUSA placed Obama ahead by 12%.
Yet this is where John McCain is making his final stand, and this is right where he wants Obama to be.

Even if McCain wins PA, he must win Florida or it is all over. That scenario is not supported by the polling, either. Rasmussen polled McCain ahead by 1 point 10/21, well within the margin of error. Other pollsters show Obama 3 or 4 points ahead.

Missouri is another must-win state for McCain. Rasmussen polled it in Obama's favour by five points on 10/19.
If McCain loses North Carolina, Obama moves in to the White House. Polling there is mixed, with Rasmussen giving McCain a two point lead (within the margin of error), while other pollsters show Obama with a single-digit lead in the state.

Indiana is a state that McCain cannot afford to lose, either. Like the others mentioned, if McCain loses it, there is no way he can reach 270 EVs. SurveyUSA polled Obama ahead by 4% there on 10/22.
Ohio is another must-win. Rasmussen favoured McCain by two points (again within the MOE) on 10/19.

There is also the western option: Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico all favour Obama (19 EVs right there) , while ND and MT are toss-ups (6 more).
Georgia, with her 15 EVs, is three points away from going to Obama.

McCain now has to get very lucky multiple times in order to win. It's like flipping a coin seven times in a row and calling it correctly.

But the truth is that these polls under-estimate Obama's support. Rasmussen relies on a tight "likely voter model" that excludes a lot of Obama supporters. If you are first-time voter in this election, Rasmussen would not count you as a "likely voter". Even though statistics show that newly-registered voters turn out to vote nearly 90% of the time, Rasmussen would not consider a newly-registered voter to be "likely". Even if you voted in the primaries, but not in previous general elections, Rasmussen would not count you as a "likely voter". That hardly seems realistic. And Rasmussen is not alone in maintaining this tight model.

Consider the massive registration drives conducted during the Democratic primaries/caucuses, in which new records were set in registering new voters. Consider the massive turnouts in the primaries. Consider the truly unprecedented ground game of the Obama campaign in mobilising voters to turn out this election. None of that is being taken into account by any pollster that uses a common likely voter model. In fact, in comparisons between "registered voters", and registered voters who self-identify as likely voters, Gallup has shown very little difference (about 2%) between the two groups. And the Democrats hold a huge registration advantage in these seven crucial states.

Many of the pollsters seem to simply be assuming that Democrats won't turn out this year, despite the historic character of this election. They are far off the mark.

Republicans are looking back to 2004 for reassurances, but that was a pre-Katrina world, a world in which the Decider was still popular and Iraq was not yet judged a miserable mistake, and the economy was not in a state of disaster. Republicans have completely ignored 2006 and the mid-term elections that brought them sweeping losses. No, it's still 2004 to them, and they are relying on imaginary 2004 voters to rally and save the day.

And, in spite of Obama showing higher "favourables" than McCain, the Republicans are still pushing Obama as a scary candidate. People simply are not afraid of Obama. They have seen him at the debates, the Convention, and in campaign stops, and they have seen a reasonable, well-spoken, and intelligent man. The more McCain pushes his wild terror of Obama, the more rabid and un-hinged the Republicans appear to the public.

So Obama is leading the national tracking polls by about eight points, and he is leading in the states he needs to win 270 electoral votes, with the chance to pick up a few more.
And this is, apparently, right where McCain wants Obama to be.

Devilishly clever of him, isn't it?

My prediction is that Obama wins with 349 electoral votes. The second most likely outcome is 375 EVs, in my view.

Bachmann's "politics of the false dichotomy"

Michele Bachmann has a putative "apology" making its way onto the airwaves here in Minnesota.
The video is here.

In this "apology", she never apologises for anything. This is as close as she comes to an apology:

"I may not always get my words right, but I know that my heart is right, because my heart is for you - for your children, and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country."

Nothing in those words apologises for her remarks accusing Obama or fellow Congressional members of being "anti-American". She is instead sticking with her line that she never said what she said; that her remarks were merely misconstrued. Bachmann seems to be saying that she tends to say a lot of crazy stuff, but her heart is in the right place.

And, coming from someone who works for the government, this is bizarre:

"Once again, our nation is at a crossroads, and it's a time for choosing. We could embrace government as the answer to our problems, or we could choose freedom and liberty."

It's hard to see how this fits in with her previous characterisation of Democrats as "anti-American". She questioned Obama's allegiance to the country based on his weak association with Bill Ayers, not because of some "Big Government" agenda. She has always been one of those Republicans that condemns as "treasonous" anyone who criticises the President or the Iraq occupation. She has consistently voted to retain the most onerous parts of the Patriot Act, and has strongly defended the illegal wire-tapping programme. Bachmann has never seen any legislation promoting a police state that she didn't like. And she has seldom failed to impugn the patriotism of anyone opposing more government intrusion and surveillance.

This has always been the basis of her "anti-American" thesis: that "liberals" are, in effect, working for "the enemy". Now, however, she has made a radical shift and claims that 'liberals" are "anti-American" because they want Big Government and are opposed to "freedom and liberty". This isn't an apology, it's a distraction.

Many people have seen Bachmann on television and wondered about Minnesota voters. How could Minnesota have elected this crazy woman?

The answer is her made-to order, gerrymandered district and the weak Democrat who ran against her in 2006.

Bachmann was elected in 2006, at the same time as Keith Ellison was elected to the House and Amy Klobuchar was elected to the Senate. These were both Democrats, and both won by large margins. Ellison is notable for being a Muslim-American; the first in the House. So the idea that Minnesotans are crazy wingnuts should find a full stop right there. Bachmann's district is a long and fairly narrow swath to the north of the Twin Cities metro area. This mostly exurban and suburban district has undergone a profound change in the past twenty years. The long-time rural citizens have seen a massive influx of "refugees" from the urban core. They were fleeing pretty much the same thing: minorities, crime, and the ordinances of the city. They were also attracted by much lower prices for land and much cheaper housing, and the chance to raise their children free of "corrupting influences". They bought themselves long commutes into the urban areas as part of the bargain, and were hard hit by the increase in gas prices.

Mostly, however, these refugees brought all of those "corrupting influences" along with them into their new Paradise of liberty. Huge housing developments crammed people into treeless refugee zones that were not much more spacious than the urban yards they left behind. Property taxes went up markedly as localities had to expand waste-water treatment, roads, parks, landfills, etc. The new residents found their neighbours' proximity distasteful and begin to demand ordinances to deal with the problems of sharing space with farms and with the activities of their fellow "freedom-seekers". Police departments expanded. Strip malls moved in. "Big box" retailers squeezed out the local businesses. What were once friendly communities became mere groupings of individuals jealously guarding their tiny fiefdoms, screaming for the local government to simultaneously "do something" about their neighbours and to "get off our backs".

The inherent contradiction with exurban development is that it requires strong regulation to avoid massive inefficiencies and steep tax increases, while the people you are trying to attract are fleeing increased regulation and high taxes.

The metro area was facing a wave of communities further and further away demanding increased amenities without increased taxes. The Metropolitan Council at last put its foot down and drew a boundary for waste-water and water services. These exurban communities would have to find local solutions to get rid of their sewage, dig local wells, and lay their own water lines. This meant that these "enclaves of freedom" had to enforce ordinances covering septic tanks and drain tiles that simply dumped the refugee's filth into local streams. The alternative was severe contamination of the drinking water. Environmental regulations stopped people from simply dumping waste oil on the ground or draining their radiators into storm drains. Treatment plants had to be built to deal with a massive local increase in waste from the new residents who wanted an urban lifestyle in a rural infrastructure. Landfill space became scarce, and developments were being built closer and closer to them; regulations were demanded for noxious odours and vermin.

Thus, the influx of "liberty-seekers" became their own undoing.

And local politicians were simply not up to the task. These refugees moved into local politics, bringing a simplistic libertarian view and a visceral hatred of taxes. Thus, precious lead time was squandered with stop-gap solutions that made no one happy and merely made more expensive options inevitable. This made it even easier to frame "government" as the "problem". And the interests of the long-time residents consistently lost out to those of the new refugees.

Culturally, the district was a seething battleground of people unable to come together for the common good due to the "get off my back" ideology of the refugees. Evangelical churches made big inroads, due to the refugees' desire to raise their children in an uncorrupted environment. And so the stage was set for Republican domination of the district. The evangelical church communities were organised into political influence groups, and the Republican message of less regulation and "traditional values" found fertile ground. The one thing everyone agreed on was their profound hatred of the "other": racial minorities, immigrants, non-Christians, and those "communist" city folk.

Into this breach stepped Michelle Bachmann.

Strongly evangelical, she claimed that God chose her for Congress. Who can argue with God, after all? If one didn't vote for her, you were then voting against God. Jumping fully on the fading Bush Bandwagon, her election was seen by Party officials as some kind of rebound in a year when Republicans were generally kicked out of office. In spite of a fairly narrow win margin, she behaved as if she had been crowned Prom Queen. She proudly tied herself to the national neo-con agenda and forgot all about her little backwater district. She said all of the right things, sucked up to all of the right people, and voted as she was told to by the Republican Party masters. Bachmann was the perfect drone for movement conservatives.

The voters in her district were completely taken for granted. When gas prices hit these refugee commuters hard, she had a typical and grossly simplistic solution: drill, baby, drill. Regulations were the problem, not her constituents' choice to live an hour away from their jobs or their lifestyles' complete dependence on multiple vehicles. When foreclosures threatened the dreams of these urban refugees, it was the damnable regulations that were to blame. And when the economy crashed, it was again "hyper-regulation" of banks and investment firms that caused it. Meanwhile, she made regular appearances on local Christian radio programmes to keep up the drumbeat of hatred against gays, Muslims, and "baby killers".

While many see her remarks on "Hardball" as her downfall, the truth is that the handwriting was on the wall with the Petters' scandal. Bachmann endorsed a con man with a shady history, and on the strength of that voucher many Christian charities and churches were fleeced on a large scale. Pastors lost their homes, charities shut down, and churches were in a financial crisis.
Bachmann did some public hand-wringing for evangelical consumption, but this was one case where she could not blame regulations for the situation. If Michelle was truly guided by God, how this could immense lapse of judgement have occurred? Faith was shaken, angry people wanted answers, and so Bachmann did what movement conservatives always do: created a distraction.

Never mind about Bachmann's links to the con man Vennes - the real thing we all need to fear is the "anti-American views" of Obama and other members of Congress. She creates another false dichotomy similar to her endorsement by God: if you don't vote for me, people who hate America will gain power. Bachmann is on the job, folks, guarding against excessive regulations and the treasonous elite out to destroy us. That makes you trust her again, right?

Bachmann really said nothing different on Hardball that she hasn't said before to neo-con audiences, or that movement conservatives don't say on a regular basis to each other. It's the Party line narrative: Democrats hate America, they want us to lose in Iraq and in the GWOT, they are guilty of treason, they have a socialist agenda, they hate Christians and God, etc.

Bachmann's real mistake, the one for which the GOP has taken her to task for, was to speak those internal talking points to the masses. To the Republican faithful, Bachmann is merely a big-mouth, not a crazy McCarthyite.

And so she claims she was taken out of context. She claims she never said what everyone can plainly see in the video she said. She denies saying that she thinks "liberals are anti-American", when nobody ever said she did. She said Obama is anti-American due to his "associations with Ayers", and she said that members of Congress should be examined for potential anti-American views - not "liberals".

Then she announces an "apology" in which she frames the issue as a struggle between "liberty" and "government", which has nothing to do with putatively "anti-American views".

If Bachmann loses this election, it will mean that movement conservatism cannot prevail in a district tailor-made for that philosophy. It will mean that her "politics of false dichotomy" are not strong enough to prevail in Minnesota. And it will mean that the neo-cons will lose another pawn in Congress.

Bachmann bites

Michele Bachmann did an interview on "Hardball" in which she said, regarding Obama, "Absolutely, I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views".

Not content with that, she called for a McCarthy-esque witch-hunt on members of Congress, to determine if they are "pro-American" enough.

"The news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would, I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out are they are pro-America or anti-America."

Chris Matthews gave her repeated opportunities to back down and moderate her remarks, but she continued to stand by them. She was just repeating the standard far-Right talking points, after all. She fully expected a pat on the head from the Party for being such a good parrot. Apparently "everybody knows" this stuff, so who could take issue with it?

Now, however, the media is just a bunch of Big Old Meanies who "misunderstood" her.
The video is here. See for yourself.

"I think the people that Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large."

How can you take that any other way than what it says? Especially when you also say, in reference to Obama:

"Absolutely, I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views"

Michele, you just said that Obama has anti-American views. You said that you were concerned about that. You can back-pedal about his "anti-American views" and say that they just aren't your views, but why would that make you "concerned"?

One can only wonder what Bachmann's proposed "investigation" of Congress would be like.
It doesn't take a genius to see that she is "concerned" about Bill Ayers. So we would likely see an investigation into everyone that each member of Congress has ever worked with, along with PTA boards, charities, and maybe even church choirs. Then we would have to look at everyone that every member of Congress has ever visited, because one of the scary things about Ayers is that Obama visited his house. We could then look at college professors, legislative aides, donors, neighbours, and of course, friends.

Since Obama has clearly and repeatedly expressed his love for America, such declarations will mean nothing to the investigators. Obviously, the truly "anti-American" among us would simply lie. Such an investigation would have to rely on others to "rat out" these traitors, possibly in exchange for clemency. Sadly necessary, if we want to ally Bachmann's "concerns", though.

How else are we to get to the bottom of what has Michele Bachmann so "concerned"?

Sure, it's an ugly job. But can we really afford to have someone in Congress who once went out to dinner with a college classmate without doing a thorough examination of their political views? Surely no "real American" would show up at the home of someone who, for example, thought that the Iraq War was a mistake, even if it was only to drop off a graduation gift for the traitor's child. And wouldn't we all like to know, if it were possible, that the woman who runs the checkout at the grocery store our Representative shops at once failed to put their hand over their heart at a baseball game? Or that one of their old college professors was married to a Muslim?

Seriously, the Republicans have already said that things like failing to wear a flag pin on your lapel is a suspect sign. They have already said that anyone who criticised the Iraq effort was a traitor and a terrorist sympathiser. These are the kind of criteria that would be applied to Bachmann's investigation.

But perhaps I just "misread" her. Perhaps she should clarify what qualifies one as being "anti-American". But I bet she won't.

Bachmann knows that the "base" agrees with her. Her mistake was simply in saying it out loud and on camera, not in believing it. The public isn't supposed to know that, unless you are a loyal Party member and an evangelical Christian, that you are considered to be a cowardly, despicable traitor in the eyes of the far-Right. Bachmann failed to keep that secret.

This is the American equivalent of the Taliban. They think they are the "real Americans", and they get to write the definition of what "American" is.

McCain's Convention Bounce?

I still think that McCain will not get much of a Convention bounce at all. Seriously, a bounce from what?

At the DNC, the Democrats unified their Party, slammed McCain, and introduced Obama to the nation while wiping out the idea that he is scary, unpatriotic, and wants to raise taxes - all to an immense audience across the nation.
They got a bounce from that, and Obama is up by 8.

What will the Republicans do?

Talk up the Iraq war, drilling, God, God and a bit more God thrown in for good measure. They will repeat several dozen times that McCain is a war hero and a POW. They will repeat all of the smears that have failed to gain traction over the past year.

This is all just re-hashing what they have already been saying for a year now. But people think that now, because it's said at a bloody Convention, that the nation will sit up and change their minds?
The Republican base is already solidified going in to the Convention. They have been un-enthusiastic, yes, but always ready to vote as they are told.

So what does anyone imagine they will get a bounce from?

I am so bloody sick of people pointing to 2004 and thinking that everything will play out the same way. This is an incredibly unique situation that is hardly comparable to 2004 or 2000. The entire electoral map has changed, but everyone still continues to think in terms of 2004: PID, Republican organisation, turnout, how Kerry did in certain states, 2004 exit polling, etc.

It's not 2004 anymore. Isn't that obvious? The Republicans have too much ground to defend. They have put their strongest candidate (most moderate), one that has made a career out of standing against them, against the Democrats...and the Republican is losing. In effect, they have put the candidate who least represents their core values against the Democrats, and even that hasn't done them any good. The McCain candidacy itself is a sign of desperation on the GOP's part, but everyone just wrings their hands over CW that doesn't match reality. It's so pathetic.

The Palin Pick

Wow. The Republicans' heads are spinning around.

By picking Palin, McCain takes the "Obama is too inexperienced" issue right off the table, which was his only non-smear issue.

By picking Palin, McCain gives up on the independents. Palin is a complete 28%-er who backs Bush completely. She is also a creationist, hard-line pro-life, and evangelical Christian. You don't pick up independents with someone like that. If independents had those views, then they wouldn't be independents - they'd already be Republicans.

By picking Palin, McCain actually alienates women voters. It takes a Republican Kool-Aid drinker to believe that women will vote for McCain simply because a woman is on the ticket, especially since that woman is completely out of the mainstream political views that the strong majority of women hold.

This is a move to appeal to the Republican base, which it will. The problem is, though, that McCain already has 87% of that base locked up. And that base is a lot smaller than it was in 2004, while the number who self-identify as Democrats has increased by 10% to record highs.

Palin will definitely improve the turnout among Republican evangelicals, but their numbers have also dropped since 2004 in a generational split.

Palin will be under intense media scrutiny in the next two months to a degree that the Governor of Alaska never was. It is almost certain that she will make some gaffe, which Republicans will be forced to defend. They will cry that the media and the Democrats are "picking on a woman", while at the same time crying about "picking on a war hero". It will be the ultimate whiner's ticket, and it will sound like these two aren't ready to face 21st century challenges.

Meanwhile, all McCain has left against Obama are smears: Ayers, Rezko, secret Muslim, crazy radical, and unpatriotic. None of these have gained traction despite being given heavy play in the primary and by McCain surrogates for several months. And Biden, HRC, and Bill will be attacking McCain constantly on his weaknesses. Being a "war hero" just won't cut it.

And the big issue about this pick that makes even Republicans pause is that McCain is 72 and has recurring cancer. If McCain dies or is incapacitated in office, then Palin takes over. Can anyone imagine Palin commanding two wars (plus any new ones that McCain has started while in office), staring down Putin, handling negotiations with Iran, Venezuela, or Pakistan? Can anyone imagine Palin convincing our allies to go along with whatever crazy foreign policy McCain has left her? Telling the rest of the world not to "pick on a woman" is not going to work in those circumstances.

Palin is not a scholar along the lines of Obama. She has no foreign policy experience, whereas Obama has been to Iraq, toured Europe, been briefed extensively on military matters, and has served on the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. Palin would inherit all of McCain's "yes men" advisors, and be completely out of her depth on the national and international stage. If the crises the country faces in the next four years all involve attending hockey games, then she can handle it. If it's more complex than that, we are all - Republican, Independent, and Democrat alike - in big trouble.

More electoral analysis

I cover polls a lot on this blog. This is because it is the only refutation to wingnut assertions.
Currently, Obama is leading McCain on Gallup by 48 to 42 in the national polls. Obama has led for almost two months now, proving that McCain's negative ads are only speaking to his base and not to the general public. Independent voters, the group that is supposed to make all of the difference to McCain's chances, still break evenly among the two candidates (Obama 43%, McCain 41%). Usually, effective negative campaigns drag down the victim's "favourables". In this case however, it is McCain's favourables that have dropped for the past month, with a current virtual tie (Obama 58%, McCain 56%).

On Rasmussen, Obama has been between 43 and 47% since early June. He's been between 44 and 45% for the past two weeks. In spite of the attacks, Obama's support seems stable among likely voters. McCain has been between 40 and 44% since early June, and in that same range for the past two weeks. There was a tie for two days in early August.

Both Rasmussen and fivethirtyeight.com give Obama the win in electoral vote projections.

One commenter on fivethirtyeight.com broke the electoral vote situation down this way:

What we are talking about, though, is that Obama has a ton of winning maps, while McCain has very few. Kerry+IA/CO/NM is a win, and he's up in all of those. Same with IA/CO/NV. Now, those fairly likely scenarios aside, if he wins Kerry+IA (which he should) then a win pretty much anywhere else, like OH, VA, NC, FL, IN puts him in extremely good shape. That's why the 50-state strategy is such a better idea than the campaigns Gore and Kerry ran, and why people do think it's going to be different this time. It might not be, but the odds are a lot better at least.

And that is essence of this election, and what makes it so very different from 2000 and 2004. The Republicans would love to make this a battle over Florida and Ohio, but the Obama campaign is too smart for that. It's fairly certain that the 2 or 3 state "battleground" approach is the route Hillary would taken as well.
Republican support is so weak that states that once were solid red are now within reach for he Democrats. And the idiotic "battleground" approach has left several states with little in the way of organisation. Those mired in the old paradigm see the "50 state strategy" as a waste of effort, but Obama is doing the work that the Party needs done by organising these putatively "red" states. Even if none of them break for Obama, the Party has fantastic data for House and Senate races, as well as future Presidential races. However, the odds are that a certain number of these states will "flip", and then Obama wins. McCain has only one or two "paths" to victory.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is targeting only 19 states. Among those 19 are very safe states for Obama: Maine, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Washington. And with the abbreviated Republican primary season, the GOP was cheated out of a Party's best chance of updating and expanding their lists of contacts. They are left with the old lists from 2004 in many cases. Thus, we are seeing the McCain campaign rely more on ads than usual.

The GOP won in 2000 and 2004 by conducting massive registration drives and bringing in millions of new voters. This year, however, the numbers netted by the GOP in nearly every state fell far below those of the Democrats. In Indiana alone, the Democrats registered more voters during the primary than voted for Kerry in the previous election.

Conventional wisdom says that 5% is the maximum lead that can be overcome by a ground campaign. Right now, the polling shows Obama with a 5 point lead in Wisconsin, and an eight point lead in Pennsylvania. New Mexico is projected to go to Obama by 5.5%, with Iowa about the same. Ohio and Virginia are still evenly split. McCain leads in Florida by a little over 3%. Obama is projected to win by a bit over 2% in Colorado.

The issue is that a lot of these polls use the "likely voter" model to skew their data. The Obama campaign has registered hundreds of thousands of new voters who will not show up as "likely voters". We are left to believe that none of these people will vote if we accept the likely voter screen on the polls. Another issue is the weighting of the polls in party identification.

The Republicans seem stuck in a rut, obsessing over Obama's inability to gain a decisive advantage. They seem to forget that McCain has failed to score any advantage. More than that:

The primary "underperforming" that's going on in this election is John McCain. Where Bush consistently polled in the 45-47% range, on average, all year in 2004 in swing states, McCain polled all summer in the 40-42% range, on average. In an electoral system where +/- 3% in national polling gives rise to +/- 350+ EV landslides, that's a huge ground that needs to be made up. If you want to see the difference, go to electoral-vote.com and click on states like IA, PA, WI, MN, MI, OH, VA. McCain is generally polling 3-5% less than Bush across the board.

With numbers like this, relying on past scenarios for a Republican win is dangerous.
Other polls show McCain's support among evangelicals is 9% weaker than Bush's 2004 numbers. And this time around, evangelicals are less of a monolithic bloc. In Texas, McCain is polling 11% weaker than Bush in 2004. Republican states such as Nevada, Montana, North and South Dakota, and North Carolina are all within 5%. McCain has immense defensive work to do that Bush never did. And of those five, he only has ground campaigns targeted for Nevada and North Carolina. That is 9 electoral votes he has given up on, or at least decided to rest on his laurels in.

McCain is also relying on a national campaign with national issues. Obama is targeting states based on local issues. The objective is to win states, after all.

The jingoism the Bush campaign employed is now yielding diminishing returns. Iraq is regarded as a mistake; whether we "win" or not is unimportant in the big picture as far as using it as an issue to rally around. And, sure, McCain is a war hero. Everyone knows he's a war hero already, though. The people likely to vote based on that are already on his side, and he's still behind Obama. He's not going to become any more of a war hero in the coming months. Likewise, McCain has hit a ceiling on his "favourables". Everyone already knows him. Everyone likely to like him already does. He can only go down or stay steady.

Lastly, his ad campaign to tear down Obama has not only met with no perceptible results in the polls, it says nothing about him. Putting down Obama does not make McCain look any better, and these ads show no contrast between McCain and Obama. At best, they make McCain the default alternative to Obama, which is very weak tea.

Back again

I'm back again after a sojourn in the blogosphere wilderness.
I've been a reader and commenter on other blogs that I don't usually frequent in an effort to broaden my perspective. This has also brought me into contact with quite a few Republican and right-wing trolls, which is refreshing because it shows that their movement is bankrupt.
A few of my observations:

• Obama's lead dropping even a point on any given day somehow means that McCain is "winning". To most people, if your candidate is still behind, it means they are losing.
• There is always something, some minor event, which is allegedly going to "break things wide open" for McCain. Perhaps a GOP hack makes a disparaging remark about Obama. OMG! McCain is gonna win now fer sure! Or Regnery Press releases another one of their slimy character assassination books ("ObamaNation") - now the public is going to find out the "truth" about Obama and he is going down in flames. It never dawns on these fools that they said the same thing two weeks ago, and Obama is still ahead.
• Republicans still think the public believes every unsubstantiated assertion they utter. Apparently the GOP has immense credibility to the nation at large, at least in the minds of these partisans.
• If a state has a military base within its borders, it means that state will vote for McCain. Obviously (to the wingnuts) voting for Obama means that you don't support the troops, and the presence of a military base means that the vast majority of the state's residents support endless war.
• Obama wants our troops to die at the hands of terrorists, per wingnut CW. This is so incredibly obvious that Obama won't even try to deny it, which is "proof". Yeah.
• Spending a few days (seven years ago) in a rural part of a state that holds less than 10% of the state's population gives you a keen insight into how that state will vote. Thus, there is "no way" that Michigan will vote for Obama - polls be damned.
• Likewise, if a wingnut polls a half dozen people in the rural area of a Deep Red state where he lives, you can easily infer from that "poll" that Obama doesn't have a chance to win on the national stage. 'Nuff said.
• One wingnut heard from another wingnut, who heard from their pastor, that Obama is a "socialist". Again, the result is that McCain will win "in a landslide".
• Unless Obama himself explicitly denies something, then it's completely true. And if he does deny something, he's a liar, so it's true anyway.
• Everybody hates liberals, and the only way they ever get elected is because illegal immigrants vote them in. Uh-huh. Likewise, numbers of registered voters don't matter because Democrats don't vote - they are too busy watching TV and doing drugs. That's why McCain wins this time.
• Everybody hates popular people. Nobody is excited about McCain, so that unpopularity means that he wins. Obvious, isn't it?

Overall, Republicans are deeply stuck in a world where it is 2002 forever, and 2006 never happened. Rush Limbaugh and Bill Kristol are believed by everyone. The "success" in Iraq proves that America wants yet another war, as long as this means a lot of Muslims will die. Christians are a persecuted minority, but yet they are so strong and numerous that this is a "Christian Nation" that shouldn't tolerate Muslims.

One would also think that the current portrayal of Obama as the Antichrist would be a good way to get evangelicals to vote for him. If Obama wins, that means the Rapture is at hand, and the evangelicals claim to want that. Sadly, the fundamentalist hypocrisy is so deep that they don't even see the contradiction. If they truly believed that Obama was the Antichrist and that the End Times are at hand, wouldn't they be repenting and selling their possessions to donate to the poor? Instead, it's just another opportunity for slander in the name of being a good Christian.

So, I'm back from the wilderness to tell you that the GOP is screwed.
They are delusional victims of their own rhetoric, resting on their laurels and hoping for legions of imaginary voters to heed the Idiot Call and follow their orders.

Numbers 7/26

Obama now moves into a seven point lead nationally.



Currently, fivethirtyeight.com gives Obama 296 electoral votes, with the possibility of an Obama landslide at about 20%. Rasmussen gives Obama 210 electoral votes without "leaners".
Pollster.com gives Obama 284 EV.

Surprisingly, Obama is only behind by single digits in five Deep South states.
I'm not saying he can win those states, but considering that the GOP is essentially a regional Party these days, it really doesn't look good for the mid-terms. When a 15 point lead in Alabama is the strongest Southern showing for McCain, any sane Republican should start to worry.

McCain casts about regarding the surge

John McCain continues to flounder in his public remarks on his signature issue, Iraq.
Now he is claiming that the "Awakening" (Sahwa) was part of the surge, despite the undeniable facts from the U.S. military itself that the "Awakening" began about six months before Bush even proposed the surge.

“Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others,” Mr. McCain said. “And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history."

Of course "that sheik", Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, was assassinated around the time Petraeus gave his September report. That's just a matter of history. Let's look at Bush's January '07 speech in which he proposed the surge:

Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops.

Now does that sound as if the "Awakening" started before or after the surge was proposed? Bush gave orders in January 2007 to increase the troop levels by 4000 to support the "Awakening". The sheer gall of McCain's statements becomes apparent when one realises that the Administration (and the GOP) spent the first six months of 2007 stridently claiming that the surge had not even started yet. Though many considered the surge to have begun in mid-February, the Republicans shrieked that the surge would only begin when the troop levels were at "full-strength" in late July or early August 2007. Again and again, they repeated that Petraeus' September report was premature because the surge had only been in progress for two months.

Seemingly oblivious to his own previous talking points, McCain neatly re-defined the term "surge" as "a counter-insurgency campaign". If "the surge" and the "counter-insurgency strategy" are simply the same thing, then why did the Republicans deny that the surge did not really start until July '07? Why do we only hear of this new definition of the surge a year after the Republicans claim that it actually started?

“First of all, a surge is really a counterinsurgency strategy,” Mr. McCain said in Bethlehem, Pa. “And it’s made up of a number of components. And this counterinsurgency was initiated to some degree by Colonel MacFarland in Anbar Province, relatively on his own. And I visited with him in December of 2006. He had already initiated that strategy in Ramadi by going in, and clearing and holding in certain places. That is a counterinsurgency. And he told me at that time that he believed that that strategy, which is quote ‘the surge,’ part of the surge, would be, would be, successful.”
“So then, of course, it was very clear that we needed additional troops in order to carry out this insurgency,” he said. “Prior to that they had been going into places, killing people or not killing people, and then withdrawing. And the new counterinsurgency, the surge, entailed going in and clearing and holding, which Colonel MacFarland had already started doing. And then of course, later on, there were additional troops, and General Petraeus said that the surge would not have worked, and the Anbar Awakening would not have taken place, successfully, if they hadn’t had an increase in the number of troops.”

So there you have it. The surge is whatever McCain says it is. The invasion itself was 'clearly' part of the surge, since the surge nor the Anbar Awakening could have taken place without it. Bush's election was part of the surge. Perhaps McCain's own birth was part of the surge. To say that the surge, itself an increase in the number of troops, would not have worked without an increase in the number of troops sounds a bit silly, but here we are. Everything good is the result of the surge, whatever it is and whenever it happened.

Meanwhile, the Sahwa want more money...or else.

Prof. John Cole writes candidly regarding the "success":

The only evidence presented for the thesis that the "surge" "worked" is that Iraqi deaths from political violence have declined in recent months from all-time highs in the second half of 2006 and the first half of 2007. (That apocalyptic violence was set off by the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra in February of 2006, which helped provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war.) What few political achievements are attributed to the troop escalation are too laughable to command real respect.

Proponents are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or when it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in February, 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the "surge" by politicians such as John McCain. But attempts to pay off the Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra US troops were sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent there). I will disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation beginning winter of 2007. The bribing of insurgents to come into the cold could have been pursued without a significant troop escalation, and was.

Aside from defining what proponents mean by the "surge," all kinds of things are claimed for it that are not in evidence. The assertion depends on a possible logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. If event X comes after event Y, it is natural to suspect that Y caused X. But it would often be a false assumption. Thus, actress Sharon Stone alleged that the recent earthquake in China was caused by China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters. That is just superstition, and callous superstition at that. It is a good illustration, however, of the very logical fallacy to which I am referring.

Of course, McCain's claim that "casualties and deaths are at their lowest point" is also false.
McCain is not only wrong about that, either. He has been wrong, so very wrong, for a long time.
Cole sums it up:

Look, it is more important that McCain was consistently wrong. He was wrong about the desirability of going to war against Iraq. He was wrong about it being a cakewalk. He was wrong about there being WMD there. He was wrong about everything. And he was wrong about the troop escalation making things better. The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent. They dropped in Basra, from which the British withdrew. Something happened. Putting it all on 30,000 extra troops seems a stretch. And what about all the ethnic cleansing and displacing of persons that took place under the nose of the "surge?" McCain has been wrong about everything to do with Iraq. And he is boasting about his wisdom on it!

Our invasion and occupation of Iraq has removed Iran's greatest foe and increased the profile of Iran throughout the region. The majority Shia 'nation' of Iraq is far closer to Iran than it ever has been. Millions have fled this "success" to live in squalor. Over a hundred thousand Iraqis have died. The 18 Iraqi brigades that Bush was so confident would take over when he made in his speech in January '07 still have not materialised. Provincial elections are moving further away, not closer.

McCain continues to distort the issue of withdrawal "timetables" as well. Obama's 16 month timetable is considered 'surrender' because it is not based on "conditions on the ground".
Yes, surely we must believe that even if Iraq should somehow collapse, Obama will be looking at his watch, and when the 16 months are up he will pull out all of the troops regardless of the conditions on the ground. We believe that, right?
Does McCain have confidence in the surge or not? If so, then let's not worry about "timetables". If not, then all of his talk about "winning" is just froth. Maliki says 16 months is a reasonable timetable, and this whole ugly mess was supposed to be about "liberating" Iraqis and letting them "stand up". If we never make plans to leave, then we never will leave. McCain is now just stalling in hopes of getting some oil concessions out of this mess.

Republicans are merely talking to themselves in GE

There seem to be two main thrusts to the aimless campaign of Sen. McCain: security and patriotism.

The "patriotism" angle is nothing more than what the GOP has trotted out for the past five or so years. The term "patriotism" is re-defined to mean "unquestioning support for the Republican agenda", with the corresponding corollary being all Democrats are traitors. Ann Coulter even took the time to document this sad meme in her book "Treason". Unfortunately for Coulter and the GOP, the public isn't buying this concept. With Bush's approval rating sinking to a new low last month, this attempt to shame the public into support for Bush (and by extension, McCain) just hasn't paid off.
As one would expect, though, this approach works well on the Republican base, so the GOP considers it a winning strategy because they believe that the vast majority of the public really, truly, deep down agrees with them. That's why we see the wingnuts constantly employing terms such as "real Americans" or "true Americans" so often. They live in a bubble world where everything that is good is due to the Republicans, and everything that is bad is the fault of the Democrats. Meanwhile, the numbers of those self-identifying as Democrats has risen to record highs. It is a startling exercise in self-delusion that deserves to be dissected and analysed by the MSM after Obama wins, which means that it will probably be overlooked and ignored. With this "patriotism" meme, the GOP is graciously offering us all a chance to love America, which apparently is considered impossible to do if you are a Democrat.
So, faced with a choice between loving America and hating America, naturally (in the mind of the wingnut) the public will come down on the side of the GOP and make the requisite embrace of torture, huge tax cuts for the wealthy to spur investment that never seems to happen, police-state surveillance that would never be abused, hatred of immigrants, hatred of Muslims, ramming fundamentalist Christianity down our throats, endless wars which are vitally necessary and which we will most certainly 'win', and a belief that America can do no wrong.

The second thrust is that of "security", in which we are supposed to be simultaneously terrified and completely confident. Shadowy, ill-defined, and incredibly malicious 'terrorists' are constantly seeking to kill us in this meme. When they aren't, they are trying to force your daughter to wear a burqa or make us all bow down to Allah at gunpoint. Only the heroic Republicans can save us, because they see through these evil schemes and have the courage to do the nasty things that are needed to 'win'...at least in the mind of the wingnut. At the same time, all is well because we are constantly getting valuable intelligence from detainees at Guantanamo and we are 'winning' in Iraq, which somehow means that we are fighting "them" over there instead of fighting them here. By fighting sectarian militias struggling for dominance in Iraq, we somehow are crushing Al-Qaeda, which has become a generic enemy which can freely be employed to describe anyone who disagrees with us regardless if they are Sunni or Shia. Extensive warrantless wiretaps are allowing us to keep tabs on these shadowy evil-doers and thwart their schemes. Brave citizens are constantly keeping their vigilant eyes on any brown-skinned people, as well as any potential lighter-skinned Quislings among us. Fear not, America, the wingnuts are on the job.

As always, though, those nasty polls have a habit of countering the wingnut bubble world, which is why they are continually dismissed out of hand as "biased" - unless they support the wingnut meme, in which case they are crowed over as "proof".
In this case, Rasmussen (an organisation that I personally consider slightly leaning to the Right) has released new results showing that the seeds of the Republican "security" meme are unlikely to fall on very fertile ground in this election campaign. Note that Republicans seem to be ones most likely to buy the "we are safer today" line, while the independent voters (the ones that are supposed to be swinging to the "maverick" candidate) are not really lapping up this meme in any convincing numbers.
Further, the issue that McCain is most relying on to win over voters is the wonderful success in Iraq. This is a tough sell, however, when half the country thinks Iraq will go down in the history books as a failure. The figures for those who think Iraq will be considered a success are eerily similar to the approval numbers for the Decider. Who would ever have thought that?

Of course, the wingnut optimist would point to this and say that these results merely show the potential for the "fear meme". If we really don't think we are safer, then Republicans can beat the drum of fear and drive the voters to the Party that offers security. The trouble with this is, of course, that the Republicans are really only offering a continuation of the policies that have made only 39% think we are safer.

Full story from Rasmussen:

Just 39% of American voters think the nation is safer today than it was before the 9/11 attacks. A larger percentage (44%) disagree. Again, there are big partisan differences on this question. Seventy-percent (70%) of Republicans believe the nation is safer, while just 18% of Democrats agree. Just over a third (34%) of unaffiliated voters believe the country is safer today.

Voters are split on the situation in Iraq in terms of the near future. While 34% think the situation in Iraq will improve in the next six months, 32% believe it will get worse. Another 25% think things will stay about the same.

In the long-term, half of voters (50%) think the War in Iraq will be deemed a failure. Just 32% believe it will be go down in history as a success. Those numbers have changed little over the past month.

Okay, but just how big an issue is "security" for the voters? If the "patriotism" meme is more or less just Republicans talking to themselves, is the "security" meme likely to gain them more traction with public in general?
Rasmussen again:

However, 24% say that national security issues are most important. Among these voters, Republicans lead on the Generic Ballot 51% to 34%. Democrats also lead among the 11% who see domestic issues like Social Security and Health Care as most important. McCain leads among the 9% who say fiscal issues are tops and among the 6% whose primary interest is in cultural issues.

During Election 2004, more than 40% of voters consistently rated national security issues as most important and just one-in-four thought economic issues were the key voting issue.

And which issue is the most important to voters? Can that offer some kind of encouragement to the McCain campaign?

When it comes to issues, 41% of voters consider economic issues to be the highest priority. Among these voters, Democrats lead 59% to 25%.

Uh-oh.
These numbers support my contention that not only is the GOP living in the past and running on the winning issues of the last election, but also that the McCain general election campaign is little more than a primary campaign in which the Republicans are simply talking to themselves. Time and time again we see Fox News "analysts" looking back to the 2000 and 2004 elections and drawing conclusions from those days as if the 2006 elections never happened. The punditry class as a whole seems to similarly be living in 2004 and is basing their views on voters that simply do not exist in sufficient numbers for McCain to win on.

Thus far, very little of the attacks of the attacks the GOP has thrown at Obama have gained any traction at all: secret Muslim, secret Hindu, scary preacher, Rezko, Ayers, secret communist, traitor, scary wife, elitist, defeatist. The sole issue that has gained some traction is "inexperienced". Ironically, this is the only issue employed thus far that has a basis in truth, so the GOP has been somewhat slow in taking full advantage of it, since they seem to have a strong preference for slander. However, how experienced was the Decider in 2000? McCain has not held any executive office, either. And since all of McCain's 'experience' only leads him to be Bush's third term, how much value can be derived from it?

Military abandoning support for the GOP

Early last month, a commenter without a profile named Jason left the following:

If you think the military on the whole does not support their President, you are mistaken, and therefore attempts to characterize them as some poor captive audience that would surely speak up if they could are misguided.

The comment was in response to Bush's penchant for making speeches before military audiences, where anyone who booed him would be subject to severe punishment. March was the last time Bush made an appearance to anything but hand-picked or military audiences, when he was booed and jeered at the opening pitch of the Nationals game.
Now we see:

In its annual reader surveys, the Military Times specialist news group found Bush's approval rate among the military had plummeted from 60 percent in 2005 to just 48 percent in 2007.

Gosh, Jason, it sure seems like someone in the military might want to boo the President if they could get away with it.
Now we find out that the support for McCain among the military and their families is at most 50%. Late last year we found that that support for the Iraq effort was slipping within the military community as well. The Republicans are running a war hero whose campaign mentions his service and POW status every single day, and the military isn't buying it.

McCain has long had a "problem" with veterans groups for his stinginess on vet benefits. Backing the neocon vision of Eternal War hasn't helped win over military families, either. It's somewhat ironic that, while the wingnuts froth over "military service" and re-define the word "patriotism" to mean "complete support of the Republican agenda", more than half of those people actually serving would be considered unpatriotic by the Right because they don't support Bush, McCain, or the premise of the Iraq occupation. Thus we have a complete logical breakdown on the wingnut end: criticising the troops is unpatriotic, but the troops don't support Bush, so the troops are unpatriotic, but that is criticism, so the wingnuts are unpatriotic.

The neocons and wingnuts overplayed their hand years ago when they conflated dissent on the Iraq occupation to treason. Too many people knew too many dissenters whose patriotism was not in question for that to work. Now a strong majority says that Iraq was a mistake or not worth fighting for - in other words, unpatriotic traitors, America-haters, and defeatists. With that sorry gambit, the wingnuts lost the magic talismanic power of the word "traitor", much like the words "liberal", "appeaser", and "terrorist sympathiser" no longer elicit guaranteed rage from the public. Republicans, however, have not realised this because they know that such words work on them. Thus, the GOP will continue its bizarre effort to cast 60% of Americans as treasonous, while simultaneously imagining that these 'traitors' will vote for them. And they will continue to invoke 'the troops' in attempts to stifle dissent, even though half of those troops disagree with the GOP.

full story from AFP:

Iraq undercuts Republican support among military

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Five years into an unpopular war in Iraq, many US military voters are eschewing their traditional Republican ties to support Democrat Barack Obama for president against John McCain, observers say.
...
"I think now you're going to see -- not that it's going to be overwhelming -- but a back away from the Republican Party ... At least (the military vote will) be split this year rather than overwhelmingly Republican," said Korb, a deputy defense secretary under president Ronald Reagan.
He predicted that McCain, the 71-year-old Republican senator for Arizona, will get "at most half of the military votes," instead of the three-to-one ratio that Republican President George W. Bush won in 2004.
The main reason for the defection is the Iraq war, where 4,113 US troops have died since the 2003 invasion and for which the US government has come under fire even from the military, despite recent security improvements.
...
A Los Angeles Times survey of 1,467 people, including 631 soldiers, veterans and their families, in late 2007 found that 57 percent of military respondents believed the Iraq war was not worth fighting -- nearly the same as the overall population (60 percent).
Asked which party they trusted most to handle important issues, the military families chose Democrats over Republicans 39-35 percent, compared to a 39-31 percent ratio among the general population.

And clueless Republicans are still looking backward to 2000 and 2004 for confidence, even though things have changed radically for the GOP.

Qualifications?

Let's look at the comment by Gen. Wesley Clark that seems to have the wingnuts all up in arms and completely rabid:

CLARK: He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has travelled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn't a wartime squadron. He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, "I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not, do you want to take the risk, what about your reputation, how do we handle this publicly? He hasn't made those calls, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: Can I just interrupt you? I have to say, Barack Obama hasn't had any of these experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.

CLARK: I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.

What, exactly, is untrue about Clark's statement of opinion?
If "riding in a fighter plane and being shot down" really is a qualification to become President, then we have never had a qualified President, have we?
It's hard for me to see how the general is "attacking McCain's military service". McCain and his supporters have made a great deal about McCain's military service. Hillary even joined in with her "threshold for Commander in Chief" remark. Clark is merely stating that McCain's particular military service, however honourable, does not automatically make him qualified.

I have a very good friend who served in the Navy handling heavy construction equipment. Does this make him qualified to be President? If I say "no", am I attacking his service?
Just as it would be highly unlikely that a President would be called upon to handle heavy construction equipment, it would be highly unlikely that a President would be called upon to fly a fighter jet, even he or she weren't 70 years old. And Commander in Chief is only one of the roles the President has to play, as Clark pointed out. In the same interview, immediately previous to the remarks above, Clark specifically honoured McCain's service.

The real issue, however, is that one particular Party devoted itself to smearing a Presidential candidate's military record four years ago. One particular Party mocked that candidate's Purple Heart by handing out purple Band-Aids. One particular Party contended that non-combat service in the National Guard was far more honourable than another candidate's combat experience in the same war. How does this happen?

It happens because Republicans want us to believe that military service only matters if you are a Republican. They have no problem attacking a former four-star general who has been decorated by portraying him as a traitor and anti-military. It's perfectly "patriotic", in their view, to attack the military service of Gen. Wesley Clark, while simultaneously beating him up for putatively doing the exact same thing. This is not about military service. It's all about calling anyone who disagrees with you a traitor, and that is simply un-American.

But Obama hasn't served in the military? So what? McCain is one mentioning his time as a POW on an almost daily basis and having his surrogates tell us about how McCain's military service makes him the only qualified candidate. If Obama said that going to college in Hawaii made him the only qualified candidate, certainly the Republicans would question that premise. And would they be "attacking his educational achievements" if they did so? No, just the premise that this makes him uniquely qualified for executive office.

The President is more of a CEO than a military commander. Which candidate admits that he doesn't know how to use a computer? What corporation would hire a CEO with that lack of skills? Which candidate graduated near the bottom of his class? Shouldn't this be considered for qualification for such a position?

It’s crucially important that we have a political debate in this country that’s at least sophisticated enough to be able to handle the following rather basic idea: Arguing that a person’s record of military service is not a qualification for the presidency does not constitute “attacking” their military credentials; nor can it be described as invoking their military service against them, or as denying their record of war heroism.

Unfortunately, we have one particular Party that does not have much going for it on the issues, and that Party is relying on military service as a defining qualification. Nearly eight years of practical experience has shown us, however, that a President with military experience has made a complete disaster of the military efforts he engaged in. Thus, it's not particularly abstract to consider that "riding in a fighter plane" really doesn't provide you with any critical insights needed to wage a successful military effort. Experience has, indeed, validated General Clark's opinion.

Republicans still short on cash

The GOP sets fund-raising quotas for House Representatives depending on their status. Those in the leadership positions are expected to raise more money than other Representatives.
It's not looking very good, either. Less than half of their "target" has been met so far.

Rep. Davis of Virginia has only raised $50,000 of the $605,000 he was expected to come up with, and he is the head of the NRCC. On the Senate side, the NRSC had $19.4 million on hand as of April 30. The Democratic counterpart had $37.6 million on hand, by comparison.

One of the reasons that we are seeing so much slander from Republicans this cycle is because it generates free media attention. A campaign can come up with any kind baseless charge or rumour, and the media will run with it without investigation, qualifying it with the cryptic "some are saying...", and the opponent's campaign will then have to spend money debunking and discrediting it.

Obviously, the Republican's cash shortfall will reduce the number and quality of ad buys. It will also, however, restrict the number and quality of promotional events and campaign workers. And with Republican enthusiasm markedly down this cycle, it will be harder to fill volunteer positions. The only upside is that Bush's economic policies have created more unemployed people with more free time to work on campaigns for free, but that's a factor working in "favour" of both Parties.

Republican House and Senate campaigns have thus far made heavy use of "cookie-cutter" ads, a generic, one-size-fits-all ad in which the candidate's name and picture merely fills in the appropriate blanks. While cheap, it fails to appeal to local issues and ties the candidate to the Bush Administration by virtue of its national nature.

The only good news for the GOP is that the RNC has raised almost double the amount the DNC has raised so far. But this money is for the convention and Presidential campaign, and the McCain ticket is unlikely to boost down-ticket races (e.g. House and Senate) significantly. Also, McCain is generally failing to gain traction against Obama in spite of recent major media buys.


story from AP:

WASHINGTON - House rank and file Republicans are tens of millions of dollars short of meeting fundraising targets set by their own campaign committee in advance of this fall's elections, according to figures circulating among the leadership, heightening concerns inside the party about major losses in November.
Most recent figures show that GOP lawmakers have brought $27 million into the coffers of the National Republican Congressional Committee in the past 17 months, far short of the target of about $58 million. Compounding the challenge, they will soon be asked to raise another $20 million or more to help candidates in selected battleground districts.
...
Republicans concede that the perception of another impending defeat makes potential donors even less inclined to contribute.

On top of this, one of the NRCC's accountants has swindled them out of a lot of money:

Compounding the problem, the committee has spent months trying to untangle the affairs of a former key staff member, Christopher Ward, who is alleged to have stolen at least $725,000 from the organization. An internal probe alleged that the former treasurer used his authority to siphon money from 2001 and 2007. The FBI is also investigating.
Ward's lawyer, Ronald Machen, declined comment on the internal probe. The NRCC said it spent $500,000 to pay for the investigation and another $300,000 to upgrade its accounting operations.

Did they really spend $800,000 chasing after $725,000? It looks that way. The money Ward is alleged to have embezzled is only 1% of the total target amount, and it was allegedly embezzled over a period of six years, so it's not as if this is the big reason for the fund-raising shortfalls.

Overall, the NRCC, which began the election cycle with a debt of more than $10 million, showed cash on hand of $6.7 million as of April 30 in its most recent report to the Federal Election Commission. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reported cash on hand of $45.2 million.

McCain "town hall" is a staged sham

McCain's "town hall meeting" on Thursday in New Jersey was covered by a blogger.

Far from an open forum in which he tackled tough questions, it was instead a campaign rally in which the questions were provided ahead of time to selected individuals that McCain was directed to by aides. He answered a total of seven questions from the audience, and abruptly ended the "town hall" when it went off-script.

The seating for the event was arranged ahead of time, and with cameras in mind. Those cameras were also directed to be turned off by McCain's staff whenever it was convenient.

The seating was staged. There were about 20 people with Veteran's hats and all were seated directly in line with McCain's podium in the front and back. Your cameras from home would make it appear that half the people there were veterans. In reality it was about 1%. Mixed into the Veterans was one angry woman who had a sign claiming she was a Hillary supporter voting McCain. This one sign was placed directly in the spot where the cameras were most likely to pick it up. She was planted there. It also appears that there was one singular woman who pulled the same stunt Thursday night at the so called Fox News McCain town hall meeting in New York. These people aren't real Clinton supporters, this too is staged.
...
The questions and answers were not chosen among random people. 5 of the 7 questioners came from the VIP section including a woman in a wheelchair who was placed there ahead of time by a senior McCain staffer and then pointed to for a question even though she never raised her hand. They were plants. A couple of them were reading from index cards. A sixth questioner was also a plant in the bleachers about 40 feet to my right. He was a local Republican mayor whom the locals were familiar with.

So we have five questions coming from a group of pre-selected people in the "VIP section", some of which were reading from index cards. One of the two questions coming from the audience came from a known-to-be-sympathetic local Republican politician. The last question, which was from the audience, was the one that ended this charade, and was the only question that McCain was asked during the entire affair that wasn't scripted or pre-arranged.
How did this minor gamble work out?

The 7th questioner was chosen because McCain thought a 9 year old child was going to ask the question. But the father took the mike, told how his wife and child flew out of Newark on 9/11 and that could have been them. He then asked a very simple question, "Why haven't we gotten Bin Laden?"
A bunch of Obama people and others cheered. (I refrained, I was to be the next question.) McCain got pissed, started rambling about the Diamondbacks and Yankees and Rudy Giuliani on a screen, said as President Bin Laden would be caught (Guess this means Bin Laden is still safe for another few months) and people were laughing that McCain wasn't answering the question.
You could see the veins in McCain starting to burst, he got very uncomfortable that his scripted rally just got derailed by this gentleman and then he ended the rally by thanking everyone and saying God Bless America.

So this is the kind of forum that McCain expects Obama to submit to?
Seven questions, 70% of which came from people that the campaign hand-picked, vetted, and most probably handed the proper questions to beforehand, another from a known Republican politician, and the last one was intended to be from a child, and this was supposed to be some kind of open forum where "tough questions" are asked?
The moment it goes off-script with a question from a well-meaning and sympathetic audience member, the whole thing is called to an end. This unscripted question wasn't even really answered.

During the 2004 campaign, Bush also only appeared before pre-screened audiences in staged affairs like this one. He continues to only publicly speak before military audiences and hand-picked crowds, or in front of organisations known to be sympathetic in which everything is arranged beforehand. No dissent can be displayed in Republican America. A fairy-tale world in which everyone loves the Decider is all that the media is allowed to show, and McCain is emulating that practise.

Meanwhile, Democrats are criticised for refusing to appear on openly hostile outlets such as Fox News by people who think that this kind of "town hall meeting" is for real.
This might play well with the Republican Faithful, but the rest of America will not be persuaded by this North Korea-style of public discourse. Republicans, however, really believe that America - the "true" America, the Silent Majority America, the "real people"- still supports them and will swallow this kind of act.
They are in for a surprise in November. Their delusion is what is preventing them from cancelling elections altogether due to some concocted "emergency".

BBC: $23 BILLION disappeared in Iraq funding

A BBC investigation into the mysterious financial black hole known as the Iraq invasion has just been released. Not surprisingly, Bush's contractor buddies ripped off taxpayers for multiple billions, and the Administration has issued orders to prevent further investigation. Are we now to 'discover' that the BBC is part of the "Far Left" that no longer takes every single utterance of the Decider as gospel truth? Perhaps.
The Republicans have created a weird "rule" that allows any facts to be dismissed out of hand based on the putative and alleged association of the source with anyone who disagrees with the Administration. Perhaps some investigator's spouse once attended a conference in which someone else said something critical of the Bush Administration; obviously the entire report can then be cast as the work of "Bush haters". The only people who can say anything critical of the Administration are those within it, and in this case, they are dismissed as "traitors".

Story from the BBC:

A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.

For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.
A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.
The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies.

War profiteering
While George Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted.
To date, no major US contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.
The president's Democrat opponents are keeping up the pressure over war profiteering in Iraq.
Henry Waxman who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said: "The money that's gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just so outrageous, its egregious.
"It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history."

Why is the Bush Administration preventing any investigation into this? Will "the terrorists" somehow benefit by a public revelation of where these billions went? Perhaps, since the Bush Administration has continually equated those who criticise both the cost and pretext of the invasion as "terrorist sympathisers", they may make an extremely flimsy case based on 'national security'. In other words, if the public knew what went on behind the scenes, they would be opposed to the Iraq effort, and that would make us less safe as a nation. Of course, that ship has sailed, with over 2/3 of Americans now saying the whole thing was a mistake. But it doesn't have to make sense for the Administration to use it as a justification.

The truth is that the Administration is preventing the investigation of these allegations so that more evidence can disappear: hard drives erased, documents "mistakenly" discarded, suppressed audits classified as secret for decades, etc.

Again and again we have heard stories of how the Administration has actively blocked investigations of corruption within the Iraqi government as well. While promoting and crowing about the efforts of an "anti-corruption team" into Iraqi ministries, the Administration was simultaneously severely limiting what this "team" of two men could investigate. The result was that they could investigate nothing, and they sat playing computer games for months while Bush claimed credit for their "work". Several stories have also come out regarding arms purchases, where the U.S. or Iraqi government was billed for brand-new, high quality equipment only to receive used, out-dated, or broken equipment instead, with the difference going into a crony's pocket. The BBC investigation uncovers another case of just this kind of abuse:

He and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2 billion out of the ministry.
They bought old military equipment from Poland but claimed for top class weapons.
Meanwhile they diverted money into their own accounts.

It is truly staggering that Republicans can cry shrilly about "earmarks" and "pork", while at the same time blocking investigations of over $23 billion in fraud in invasion and occupation expenditures. The justification is that there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Why is there no evidence of wrongdoing? Because the Bush Administration has continually prevented any investigations based on unprecedented secrecy. Thus, the Republicans claim this is merely an example of the "criminalisation of politics", in which poor Republican operatives are being persecuted for being on the wrong side of the Aisle.

When one starts with the premise that the Republicans and their minions can do no wrong, it is very easy to justify stonewalling investigations. And once something is investigated, it is suddenly "in the past" and it is time to "move on" and "put it behind us". Of course, this is only a last-resort position, because the first line of defence is always that the investigators are biased. In other words, the investigators did not decide at the outset that nothing wrong was done, or that the investigators had been critical of some aspect of the invasion and occupation in the past, making them obviously part of the vaguely-defined "Far Left".

The GOP had better brace itself for a steady stream of this kind of revelation for years to come once Bush leaves office. Their traditionally weak defence is only effective on the faithful, and only possible with the complicity of the Executive to conceal facts. Mid-term elections will feature Republican sound bites of unswerving loyalty to Bush contrasted with revelations of corruption that they defied anyone to investigate.

Where's all that cheap gas from Iraq?

Remember when one of the arguments in favour of invading Iraq was that gas prices would drop below the 2003 level? This was one of the populist points made repeatedly. If you opposed the invasion, then you wanted gas prices to remain at $2 per gallon, because "we would get the oil" and that meant really cheap gas somehow (though refinery capacity has been the chief bottleneck for gasoline price drops for decades now).

Remarkably, this bogus claim was also used in the First Gulf War.

And, even now, it's is being put forward as a reason for invading Iran, because this time "we" will get the oil -- or rather, the multinational oil companies will get the oil, and we all 'know' that they will act in our best interests.

Not so remarkably, the Gulf States failed to see our invasion of Iraq as a shining success that made them safer and more secure, and thus declined to increase production at the Decider's request.

GOP leader willing to settle for losing 8 Senate seats

The NRSC is the GOP organisation responsible for regaining the Republican majority in the Senate.
The leader of the NRSC, John Ensign, has availed himself of the peculiar Republican propensity to define "success" as "whatever the current situation is". Thus, the GOP is forever "succeeding" in everything that it does.

Now, the NRSC has re-defined "success" as losing no more than eight Senate seats.

From TPM:

In a further sign that Republican hopes are fading badly, the head of the Senate GOP's campaign committee has set a new goal for the party this Fall: Not to lose too many Senate seats.
NRSC chair John Ensign has moved the goal posts, according to the Savannah Morning News, saying that the GOP will have succeeded if they don't lose more than eight seats.
Ensign pointed out that if the Dems win nine seats they'll get to the filibuster-proof magic number of 60 -- at which point, Ensign warned, "they will be able to do pretty much whatever they want."
So if the Dems can't get to a 60-seat super-majority, the GOP will have won. Talk about lowering the bar.

Story from SavannahNow.com:

Democrats now have 49 seats, with two independents who vote with them.
Republicans hold 49 seats now, with 23 up for re-election this year, and five GOP senators retiring, giving away the incumbent advantage.
Democrats only have to defend 12 seats this year.
An eight-seat loss would be a very bad year for any party, even the party holding the White House at the end of a second term, when voters typically hunger for change. So, it's surprising for a party leader to speak in such frank terms about major losses.
Why would the number of seats matter if it's anything less than 51 and taking the majority, a circumstance Ensign describes as unlikely? By holding at least 41, the GOP would prevent the majority party from the 60 votes required to end filibusters and to push an unpopular bill to a vote on the floor through the cloture procedure.
"With 41 votes in the U.S. Senate, you can (1) block bad legislation, and (2) you can make the majority respect the minority's rights. And you can help craft good legislation," Ensign said. "If the Democrats were able to get to 60 votes - literally even if they get to 57-58 votes because they always seem to pick off a couple or three Republicans on a lot of votes - and if they win the White House ... they will be able to do pretty much whatever they want."

In other words, the Republicans would be unable to continue their obstructionist campaign.
In reality, however, there are a number of conservative Democrats who would putatively take some of those Senate seats, so the phrase "do pretty much whatever they want" is really just fear-mongering. Still, much of what we have seen for the past six months (at least) are straight Party-line votes by the Republican senators on issues that can easily be turned against a senator up for election. The GOP has chosen to sacrifice senators in order for Bush to prove that he's still "relevant". This also means that the next mid-term elections will see roughly the same number of Republican senators up for election, who will still presumably be running on the Bush agenda, since that's what got them elected in the first place.

Kel at The Osterley Times covers the doubts among other Republicans over McCain's campaign.
She also has video of McCain claiming that Putin is the President of Germany.
The Democrats are also making gains in fund-raising.
Al Franken has won the DFL nomination to take on Norm Coleman in Minnesota.
John McCain says that the Constitution states that America is "a Christian nation".

McCain says, "I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation." He continues, "I think the number one issue that is in the selection, that which people should make a selection of the president of the United States is, 'Will this person carry on in the Judeo-Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?'"

The United States Constitution, of course, specifically states that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Recall that this "Christian nation" line was the basis for the right-wing freakout over a Hindu prayer being made in the Senate. Recall also that fundamentalist evangelical Christianity only came into existence in America more than a century after the Constitution was signed and ratified. McCain is now using the metaphorical corpses of the Founding Fathers as ventriloquist dummies for an argument in favour of something that they never advocated or were aware of. McCain is using the term "Christian" as interchangeable with "born-again fundamentalist Christian", which is a gross distortion and nothing near "straight talk". Indeed, in many of the former colonial states such fundamentalist views would have been punished as heresy, but now we are being led to believe that evangelical Christianity was not only in existence at the time, but also accepted and prevalent.