Stop Palin-McCain!

Bigots for Obama

Barack Obama may be making unexpected inroads into a significant but under-reported (and, perhaps, under-appreciated) demographic: white racists.

According to a story on polling website FiveThirtyEight.com, an Obama campaign worker was on the phone, delivering her standard campaign pitch to a woman in southern Virginia, when the woman's husband broke in to the conversation. "We're voting for the nigger," he said, and hung up.

I suppose that, to someone in the Obama campaign, this is the ultimate mixed message, sort of a self-contained "good-news/bad-news" line. And although I don't expect that catchy phrase to start showing up in Obama commercials anytime soon, I suspect that the Obama folks are happy to get anybody's support, even if the voter in question has to pull the Obama lever with straining muscles and clenched teeth. (And that's probably the last time I'll be able to use the "pull the lever" metaphor, as mechanical voting machines seem to be going the way of telephone dials and slide rules.)

While the 538 story is, of course, no more than scant anecdotal evidence, I think it may represent the flip side of what I'm seeing here in the suburbs of Dallas. In past elections, my front yard has been the only one for miles around that sported a campaign sign for a Democratic candidate, while signs for Republican candidates were as pervasive as fire-ant mounds. This year, however, I've seen a widespread scattering of Obama signs, challenged by only a very few signs plugging the Palin-McCain ticket. I assume that most of my neighbors will still vote Republican this year, but they're not enthusiastic enough about it to advertise the fact. They'll do it, but they're not happy about it. Conversely, there may be more than a few whites who, even though they're appalled by the depressing Palin-McCain ticket, are not entirely comfortable with the idea of voting for a black presidential candidate. They're not happy about it, but they'll do it.

I'm hoping that Obama's surprising strength among those who espouse the racist lifestyle may counteract the somewhat discredited "Bradley Effect," in which non-blacks tell pollsters that they're voting for a black candidate, but once they're in the voting booth they can't bring themselves to actually do it. If the Bradley Effect actually exists, it might cost Obama, say, five percent of the popular vote. But if Obama can pick up the votes of the eloquent gentleman from Virginia and other members of the racist community, maybe it'll all even out in the end.

Me? I'm voting for...

John McCain, RIP

The reactionary base of the Republican Party has never been especially enthusiastic about the candidacy of John McCain. But now, for the first time, they're really excited about the chance that he might win the election.

After which, they hope, he'll die.

It's not that they dislike him so much that they actually wish him ill. But they're salivating at the thought that their new darling, Sarah Palin, might become the President of the United States. And, unfortunately for John McCain, there's only one way that can happen.

The Secret Service, as you know, has the responsibility of protecting John McCain from his enemies.

If he wins the election, they may have to start protecting him from his friends.

A Requiem for Sarah

I wouldn't have thought that it was possible, but I have to admit that I feel sorry for Sarah Palin.

It's true that I have dramatic disagreements with her political philosophy, and it's certainly true that I fervently hope that she and her running mate John McCain lose the election. But I still can't help but feel a twinge of sympathy for her about the way she's been treated.

Not by the press.

By the McCain campaign.

My guess is that they put the hard sell on her to join the ticket: It would energize the Republican base. It would help attract women voters. It was her duty as a loyal Republican and a patriotic American. And even if the Dems won, she would gain national exposure and become a household name. What did she have to lose?

I'm thinking that the answer to that question is: Her political career.

For a couple of weeks after the convention, the campaign kept her wrapped up like a mummy -- she made lots of speeches (OK, she made one speech lots of times), but her handlers kept journalists away from her as if they were would-be assassins.

The they threw her to the wolves.

The Charlie Gibson interview was a disaster for Palin -- but hey, it was her first try, surely the McCain people would get her into shape for the next interview, right? She had tragically (or, perhaps, comedically) muffed the question about how being Governor of Alaska gave her foreign policy experience, so you just knew that the McCain folks would, if nothing else, make sure that he had a snappy answer to that question. And yet, when Katie Couric asked Palin the same question, her answer was even more head-shakingly embarrassing than her response to Gibson had been.

The only explanation I can come up with is that the McCain people, after giving Palin the bum's rush to get her onboard, have basically left her to, in the immortal words of John Ehrlichman, "hang slowly, slowly twisting in the wind." Ehrlichman used that charming phrase as a suggestion for how the Nixon administration should reward the loyalty of FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, as a way of diverting Watergate-scandal attention away from the Nixon inner circle. And whatever else you might say about Sarah Palin's comedy-inducing interview performances, you have to admit that they've helped divert media attention from her charisma-impaired running mate.

The problem for Palin is that she's become an object of ridicule. For the rest of her life, it will be impossible for her to give a speech without half the audience wondering if they're listening to Sarah Palin or Tina Fey. She (Palin, not Fey) probably figured that, even if the Republicans lost, she would come out of the race with national stature, increasing her power at home in Alaska, and creating the possibility that she might compete for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Instead, she's become a self-contained parody, a one-woman comedy routine. Although the Republicans like to call her "the most popular governor in America," I think that she'll have a hard time winning re-election in 2010. In fact, unless the residents of Wasilla will have her back as Mayor, I think that her political career might be over.

With the VP debate only a couple of days away, it seems that the campaign is finally giving Palin some serious coaching, so hopefully she won't make a complete fool out of herself on national television.

Then again, hopefully she will.

The Rasputin Wing of the Republican Party

What will it take to finally kill off the Republican Party?

They've survived a staggering array of hits that would have mortally wounded a less resilient organization. For example:

• They drummed up a war for no good reason, then they tried to fight it on the cheap to make a point. As a result, the Republican administration was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqi civilians. And although the situation is now much calmer than it was (thanks to "the surge," the brilliant and creative strategy of finally sending in enough troops to get the job done), it's not even close to being over yet.

• They presided over the most catastrophic economic collapse in 80 years, taking the United States from a record budget surplus to a record budget deficit in less than a decade. (Like the war in Iraq, this one ain't over yet either.)

• They championed deregulation as if it were a religion: Free market GOOD, intrusive government BAD. Results? See previous bullet.

• After preaching that they were the party of "family values" for the last 15 years, they've had to endure the agonizing (but darkly humorous) spectacle of various prominent members being forced to resign (or promising to resign, and then changing their minds) after being implicated in various tawdry scandals.

So why do Sarah Palin and her running-mate John McCain still show up nearly dead-even with the Obama-Biden ticket in the polls?

Frankly, I don't think that the Republicans could have done more damage to the country if they had set out to do it on purpose. I can't understand why anyone would vote for them. And yet, nearly half the people in the United States say that that's exactly what they're going to do.

One obvious reason is that Republican candidates tend to be more effective campaigners, in that they're much better at being nasty and going for the jugular than Democrats are. The main reason for this, I think, is that Conservatives (the core of the Republican Party) tend to see things in black-and-white: either you're with us or you're against us, if you speak out against the war you're a traitor, love it or leave it, and so on. On the other hand, Liberals (the Democratic core) tend to see shades of gray rather than absolutes, they know that there's more than one side to every story. This lack of intolerance puts them at a tremendous disadvantage against a party that is basically certain that they have God on their side. Being open-minded doesn't help you win elections. Being cock-sure to the point of arrogance does.

Example: Try to imagine what the reactionary Republican media would be saying if one of the Democraticcandidates had an under-age, unmarried, pregnant daughter. You and I both know that this would be seized upon as yet another example of Liberal permissiveness gone wild. (The Democrats are in town! Hide your children!) But the Democrats have been silent on Bristol Palin's pregnancy – which, to my way of thinking, is as it should be. Democrats look at the foibles of their own friends and families and know that they don't want to be the ones to cast the first stone. Republicans, with a warehouse full of stones, would love to cast them, but don't want to waste their ammunition on one of their own.

Rasputin, as you may recall, had to be stabbed, clubbed, poisoned, burned, drowned, and shot repeatedly before he would finally succumb. Similarly, the Republican Party has survived a pointless war, an economic meltdown, and one scandal after another, and yet there's still nearly an even chance that the Palin-McCain ticket will win the election.

Maybe I'm off base with the Rasputin analogy. Maybe the real explanation is...

Nah, I don't want to subscribe to fanciful theories about groups of people who are nearly impossible to kill. So I'd have to say that it's probably nothing more than a rumor that delegates were searched on their way into the Republican National Convention to make sure that they weren't carrying any garlic.

unPopular Vote: The Obama-Palin Administration

Most of the latest polls show that, if the election were held today, more people would vote for the Palin-McCain ticket than for the Obama-Biden ticket.

This would be interesting if we, the people of the United States, actually had the right to vote for President. But, of course, we don't. As every American who was even moderately sentient eight years ago knows, we, the people, vote for electors on a state-by-state basis, and then the 538 electors meet in the Electoral College to decide who should be the next President of the United States. (OK, the electors don't all actually "meet" – but then again, when I was in College I wasn't always where I was supposed to be, either.)

Until eight years ago, if Americans thought about the Electoral College at all, we mostly thought about it as some arcane piece of political trivia, of interest only to scholars and pedants. After all, the electoral vote result hadn't differed from the popular vote result for more than a century. But then, in the infamous hanging-chad election of 2000, half a million more people voted for Al Gore than voted for George Bush – but since a majority of the 538 electors voted against Gore, Bush became our President. And suddenly we all wished that we had paid a little more attention in civics class when the subject of the Twelfth Amendment came up.

After the 2000 election, the Electoral College quickly became the darling of Republicans in general and, especially, the right-wing reactionary media. This struck me as more than a little bizarre, because I had never thought of the issue of popular votes vs. electoral votes as a Republican vs. Democrat issue or even as a Conservative vs. Liberal issue, it was more of a let's-do-something-different vs. let's-keep-things-the-way-they-are issue (OK, maybe that is a conservative issue, with a small "c"). I never entirely understood the reactionary argument that the Electoral College protects the rights of smaller states, because what it more often does is effectively remove small states from the electoral process completely. If you're running for President and you have a limited media budget, are you going to buy ads in California (where 55 electoral votes are at stake) or in Nevada (which has all of five electoral votes)? Exactly. If you live in a small state, don't expect to see any of the candidates (live or on TV) until the primary battles begin again in 2011.

[Yes, I know that Obama was in Nevada today. That's the exception that proves the rule. I have no idea what that phrase means, but I'm glad that I finally had a chance to trot it out.]

Not only did right-wing praise of the Electoral College strike me as strange, it also seemed to be more than a little short-sighted. I mean, what would the reactionary media say in the next election if the opposite happened – that is, if the Republicans were to win the popular vote but lose the electoral vote? (That nearly did happen, by the way – if 60,000 of the people in Ohio who voted for George Bush had voted for John Kerry instead, Bush would have still received nearly three million more votes than Kerry nationwide, but Kerry would have garnered five more electoral votes than Bush, and he would have been the President.)

And here's where it gets interesting: The stars may be lining up for the same thing to happen again. As I said at the start of this post, the polls currently indicate that the Palin-McCain ticket would win the popular vote by a few percentage points if the election were held today. But an analysis of the state-by-state polling results indicates that the Obama-Biden ticket is leading in the electoral vote – which is, of course the only vote that counts. If this dichotomy holds, we could once again find ourselves in a situation where most American voters choose one candidate, but the opposing candidate becomes our President.

But wait! There's more!!

It's entirely possible that, no matter which way the meaningless popular vote goes, the electoral vote could be a tie. If that were to happen, the President would be chosen by the House of Representatives (with each state getting one vote), which would effectively mean that the new President would be a Democrat. And the Vice President would be selected in a similar manner by the Senate, which would mean...

OK, here's where it gets really interesting.

It's true that the Democrats control the Senate just as they do the House. But their margin in the Senate is only 51-49, which is literally the thinnest possible margin. And two of those 51 votes don't actually belong to Democrats, they belong to Independents. One of those Independents is Bernie Sanders, a "democratic socialist" who would nearly certainly vote with the Democrats (so the odds of an outright 51-49 Republican victory are slim). But the other Indie is none other than Joe Lieberman, who has been a Democratic politician for something like 40 years, so you might expect him to vote for a Democrat for VP, were it not for the fact that he was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention.

So, if the electoral vote is tied and the VP vote gets thrown to the Senate, and if Joe Lieberman votes with the Republicans, we've got ourselves another tie. What happens then?

Since it's never happened before, nobody can give you a definitive answer to that question.

But wait, you say, as you strain to remember what the Constitution said when you last read it in High School: Doesn't the Vice President vote to break ties in the Senate?

And the answer is: In the normal course of events, you're absolutely correct. But the Twelfth Amendment implies that 51 actual Senators would have to vote to elect a new Vice President, which would seem to mean that the sitting Vice President, one Richard Bruce Cheney, would not get a vote.

But what happens if the Republicans dispute that interpretation and insist that Mr. Cheney does have the tie-breaking vote? Who settles that dispute?

Typically, the Senate sets its own rules, and the Courts have been reluctant to interfere. But the courts have been similarly reluctant to interfere with a state's right to conduct its own elections – and yet the Supreme Court managed to overcome its reluctance in 2000, bringing an abrupt end to the recount(s) of the votes in Florida. So if the Repubs were to ask SCOTUS (for the acronym-deprived, that's the Supreme Court of the United States) to allow Dick Cheney to cast the tie-breaking vote, I think it's entirely possible that they might decide that (a) they do indeed have jurisdiction, and (b) Mr. Cheney does indeed have that right.

And if Dick Cheney gets to cast the tie-breaking vote for Vice President, which way do you think he'll vote?

President Obama, say hello to Vice President Palin.

Palin: Get The L Out!

Remember: If you get the L out of Palin, you have nothing left but Pain!

I have no idea what that means either, but it's kinda catchy, don't you think?

Sarah Palin as Human Shield

John McCain is still running for president. I know this because I see lots of news clips of McCain being introduced by Sarah Palin, and she says that John McCain is running for president, so it must be true.

I assume that what happens is that Palin delivers her rousing intro, the reporters go home, and then McCain delivers his speech. But it's always possible that, as soon as Palin finishes up and the cameras click off, she and McCain may hop back onto the bus and head off to their next gig, without wasting the time that it would take for John McCain to deliver yet another snoozer.

This situation offers one obvious benefit to McCain: The press can no longer criticize what he's saying, because he's not actually saying anything any more. And if the press tries to question what she's saying, it turns out that the press is biased, sexist, and disrespectful, and (according to McCain's campaign manager) is not treating Sarah Palin with the deference that she deserves.

I'm not sure that John McCain can hide behind Sarah Palin until Election Day, but I suspect that he'd like to try. After all, if the current President could refuse to testify in front of the 9-11 Commission unless he could hide behind his VP, there's no reason why John McCain shouldn't be able to continue to use Sarah Palin as a human shield for the next couple of months.