From last night…
Another angle…
Oh, I know. It's not fair…. photos snapped at an inopportune time.
But it's funny anyway.
McCain’s Best Moment From Last Night Turned Into An Obama Ad
McCain said to Obama: "I'm not Bush. If you wanted to run against Bush, you should have run four years ago."
Point McCain. A good "gotcha" line, well-delivered.
Um… well… except for the Obama ad that came out immediately this morning:
Pow!
What We’ve Learned About Joe The Plumber So Far
- His real name is Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher.
- He's NOT an unaffiliated voter. He's always been for McCain, and he's a registered Republican. [UPDATE: He was originally registered with the Natural Law Party, which supported (before it became defunct) a flat tax.]
- He "hates" Social Security.
- Why invading Iraq was good for Iraqis: "It’s like someone coming to Jesus and becoming saved"
- He's concerned that Obama's tax policies will hurt him if he buys a plumbing business, which is interesting since he doesn't even have a plumbing license nor the means to buy a plumbing business.
- Very few plumbers make $250,000 a year anyway, so he probably won't fall into the tax bracket of Obama's plan where he pays more taxes. The $250,000 applies to profits, not net income, and Joe doesn't seem to understand that.
- At best, all Joe is saying is that he doesn't support a regressive tax plan, which doesn't jibe with the majority of American people, especially those in the middle and lower income brackets.
- And, oh yeah — he doesn't his pay taxes anyway (link is to the docket of the Ohio courts showing that "Joe" owes back taxes). [UPDATE: More from Bloomberg]
- For what it's worth, the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters has endorsed Barack Obama
And although we don't KNOW this for sure if he's related, there was a fellow named Robert M. Wurzelbacher Jr., also from Ohio, who is the son-in-law of Charles Keating. Robert M. Wurzelbacher Jr. was caught up in the S&L scandal of the 1990's and did some time.
Debate Reactions (Compiled By Andrew Sullivan)
Tonight, we saw a McXplosion. Every single attack that Sen. McCain has ever wanted to make, he took the opportunity tonight to make. Around 30 minutes in, McCain seemed to surrender the debate to his frustrations, making it seem as if he just wanted the free television.
McCain looks angrier and more petulant than any participant in any major debate I've watched. Watching him try to stay seated is like watching a furious kid try and obey a timeout. He can hardly hold himself still.
You just heard why John McCain will lose. He pivoted from an attack on ACORN and Ayers to his campaign getting the economy back on track. Worst segue ever. The two don't line up. Ayers and ACORN don't take you to a larger campaign theme. This isn't "Swiftboating" which took you to the War on Terror. This isn't Willie Horton, which took you to crime. This isn't "States Rights" which takes you to busing and the Voting Rights Act. It's just empty demagoguery. It doesn't say anything about what is foremost in the electorate's minds.
I actually thought McCain's Joe-the-plumber bits were okay in substance, but completely undermined by his grin at the end. What's with that grin? I guess his advisers told him to be less dour and serious, but instead of making him look genuine, it has the total opposite effect.
It seems like we've now seen McCain's Ayers/ACORN primal scream. I'm not sure Obama knocked anything out of the park. But at the end of it, I don't think McCain landed any solid punches either. And McCain was often incoherent and a bit kitchen-sinkish. Basically a draw, though if recent polls are any indication, the draw in debate terms may hurt McCain since people do not like McCain's attacks.
…to have McCain directly address Joe the Plumber by speaking into the camera is a great idea, from a campaign strategist's point of view. It's sort of a theoretical ideal, actually. Were I to run for office I would hire whoever dreamed up that concept. The trouble is, you need a candidate who can speak in complete, linear, coherent sentences. McCain is not that candidate.
…someone from the McCain camp better have Joe’s phone number and arrange a joint appearance pronto.
Neither McCain nor Obama are doing themselves any favors bickering back and forth about who has the nastiest campaign, but McCain, after a strong initial attack pushing Obama to repudiate some especially nasty attacks that didn’t come from the Obama campaign, comes off looking petulant, rambling, and cranky – a spoiled bully nagging the principal to punish another kid who once called him a name.
…the ten minute or twelve minutes that began with Obama looking at McCain and talking about crowds at Palin rallies saying "Kill him" were riveting TV and seemed to reveal purified versions of the persona each candidate has been presenting through the previous sessions. This debate may matter less in the long-term outcome than the others, since that's typically true of final debates. But because the contenders are engaging each other more directly — being at the same table, being physically so close to each other, having more trouble containing their emotions, being aware that the whole thing is almost over — in human terms this is actually the most interesting.
John McCain says Sarah Palin knows a lot about having children with autism. Presumably he thinks she knows more about this than anybody in the country. Presumably he also thinks autism is approximately equal to Down Syndrome.
Okay, I wasn't voting for him anyway, but I find McCain's focus on attacking Obama, rather than his own policy, unbelievably grating. His strongest performance of the night has been talking about the benefits of his own health plan, drawing a reasonable distinction between his philosophy and Obama's, and coherently explaining that difference, without resorting to either whining or calumny.
Overall, I don’t see how McCain helped himself tonight, much less hit the home run he needed to put himself back into this thing.
Drum:
I know I'm partisan, but McCain seemed completely out of his depth tonight. He was flitting from point to point all night without ever putting together a coherent argument, and grabbing miscellaneous attacks from the rolodex in his head whenever some bright idea popped into his mind. His energy level was weirdly erratic, tired at times but then suddenly perking up whenever he got annoyed by something and remembered some zinger that he wanted to fire off.
McCain lost the overall message of the debate. The cost of McCain's sharper tone was that he sounded more like a dogmatic Republican. Obama was softer, let many points go, but was much more effective at sounding like a moderate.
OK, that's over. And so is the McCain campaign. He was more aggressive than he's been so far, and he came close to landing some blows on Obama. But he never really connected, and for the most part this debate was as platitudinous as they all have been. McCain came off as sour, agitated and petulant. Obama — man, nothing rattles that guy. McCain was two tics away from a vein-popping "You can't handle the truth!" Jack Nicholson moment, I felt. At one point, I thought: Which one of these men would I want in the White House when the 3 a.m. phone call comes in?
Verdict: Obama: D.E.F.E.N.S.E. McCain: Hey, I tried.
I Missed The Debate….
… but I understand it was mostly about a plumber named Joe. Is Joe the plumber a buddy of Joe Sixpack?
One thing is for sure. This guy is going to get a LOT of business.
That said, the CBS flash poll of uncommitted voters said:
Fifty-three percent of the uncommitted voters surveyed identified Democratic nominee Barack Obama as the winner of tonight's debate. Twenty-two percent said Republican rival John McCain won. Twenty-five percent saw the debate as a draw.
CNN also gives it to Obama, 58% to 31%.
The Debate Tonight
Rehearsal will prevent me from live-blogging the debate tonight, but if these McCain debate prep videos (obtained exclusively by The Seventh Sense) are any indication, McCain is going to come out hard against Obama.
Even People Who Think Obama Might Be A Terrorist Prefer Him To A Republican
Wow. This is how bad the GOP brand has gotten. Ben Smith at Politico reports:
I just got an astounding e-mail from a Republican consultant I know well. He's a guy who's always thought Obama had a "glass jaw," and was always among those agitating for hitting Obama harder.
Recently, he conducted a focus group in an upper-Midwestern state, showing them the kind of ad he thought would work: A no-holds-barred attack, cut for an independent group, which hasn't aired.
I'm just going to reprint his amazed e-mail about the focus group:
Reagan Dems and Independents. Call them blue-collar plus. Slightly more Target than Walmart.
Yes, the spot worked. Yes, they believed the charges against Obama. Yes, they actually think he's too liberal, consorts with bad people and WON'T BE A GOOD PRESIDENT…but they STILL don't give a f***. They said right out, "He won't do anything better than McCain" but they're STILL voting for Obama.
The two most unreal moments of my professional life of watching focus groups:
54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan…hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."
The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."
I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I sat on the other side of the glass and realized…this really is the Apocalypse. The Seventh Seal is broken and its time for eight years of pure, delicious crazy….
Branding McCain as "four more years of Bush" was the winning strategy for Obama. And it was pretty easy to do, with the (undisputed) fact that McCain supported Bush policies 90% of the time.
I, for one, would prefer that people vote FOR Obama, rather than AGAINST McCain, but I'll accept them any way they come….
The Great Schlep Might Be Working
Two weeks ago, comedian Sarah Silverman and The Jewish Council for Education and Research launched The Great Schelp. The purpose was to encourage youth to visit their grandparents in Florida (or, alternatively, to threaten NEVER to visit, I suppose) in order to convince them (the grandparents) to vote for Obama. Here's the video:
CNN did a follow-up, and it appears to be having success:
Thousands of people pledged to call their relatives in Florida and more than 100 people volunteered to pay their own way to travel to the Sunshine State to campaign for Obama among Jewish voters, Wallach said.Bender saw the Silverman video on YouTube in Los Angeles, California, where he works as a writer. Despite the humor of Silverman's call to schlep, the video's message resonated with Bender because of the difficulty he faced convincing his own grandparents.
"I thought it was brilliant," Bender said.
He decided to go to Florida and try one more time.
When Bender recently returned to his grandparents' retirement community in Tamarac, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale, he was greeted with several surprises. Months of telephone conversations and his trip had paid off: His grandparents told him shortly after he arrived that they were going to support Obama.
The next surprise was that his schlep had generated interest around their retirement community.
A lot of interest. So many other seniors wanted to hear about Obama that the venue for a meeting on the subject had to be changed from the Furst's living room to a ballroom in the community's clubhouse.
An hour before Bender started to make his case about Obama on Sunday, groups of senior citizens were staking out space in the ballroom. Soon there were more than 100 people and no more chairs.
Sporting an Obama T-shirt with Hebrew writing on it, retiree Morty Brill said, "The economy, the war, you think you can trust Republicans to fix them?"
If there were any people in the room with reservations about Barack Obama, they kept those doubts to themselves.
As Bender told the crowd that Obama was not a Muslim and that Obama was a staunch supporter of Israel, he was met with heads nodding in agreement throughout the room.
Pretty cool.
For The Last Time, It’s Not Voter Fraud!
I'm hearing it all the time on the 24 hour network stations, and not just Fox. They keep calling the ACORN thing "voter fraud".
This is the meme coming from the right-wing blogs, and it could be nothing further from the truth. And you know why this is happening? So that when Obama wins the election, the conservatives can claim, "Yeah, but only because ACORN and other Obama-sympathetic groups cheated."
Let's get something clear. When volunteers employed by ACORN (ACORN itself is not doing this) register fictional people with fictional names like "Wild Turkey" and fictional social security numbers to match, this is not voter fraud unless (a) the phony registration goes unnoticed (and as evidenced by the news, they are not going unnoticed) AND (b) the fictional registered voter shows up to vote.
This is, more appropriately, "registration fraud". And it is illegal and should be condemned and blah blah blah. But it will have no effect on the outcome of the election, and talking about it like it will is simply irresponsible
October Surprise
9-1? Really?
The Sox got their asses handed to them last night. I'm not going to be able to watch tonight's game, but a friend is in attendance, so I think we'll even up the series.
From Now On, Please Don’t Send Me Fan Mail
I, like Ringo Starr, have had enough.
And I'm sure we get the same amount of fan mail.
And Up We Go
760 points (the biggest daily gain ever, if it holds) as of 3:45 pm….
Of course, this is one the news that all the countries got together and came up with a plan (investment rather than aimless stimulus), which is how things should be done, rather than the U.S. going it alone and mucking it all up.
UPDATE: Up 940 as of 4:05 pm. The markets are officially insane. And with my luck, my money markets were all moved to T-Bills.
Marsha, Marsha, Marsha
Seems like the oldest Brady girl really got around. Maureen McCormick has written a memoir in which she..
discusses her romance with TV sibling Barry Williams, her dates with Michael Jackson and Steve Martin, cocaine binges and parties at the Playboy Mansion and the home of Sammy Davis Jr., an unwanted pregnancy and trading sex for drugs.
And thus, another icon from my childhood is destroyed.
538
Nate Silver is a statistics geek.
As his Wikipedia entry notes, he gained minor notoriety with baseball, co-authoring several books and articles on baseball statistics, coming up with his own types of statistics, like PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm), a statistical system that projects the future performance of hitters and pitchers.
In March of this year, he turned his considerable statistical skills to politics, and a blog entitled fivethirtyeight.com. At this site, he predicts the outcome of the election, based on current polls. However, he has weighted the polls, based on their performances during the primaries. He then runs computer simulations based on those polls.
The site is a little geeky, and Silver clearly falls within the Obama camp, but he is anal about his statistical analysis. It is a site to bookmark for the next few weeks.
Here, for example, is his state-by-state projection map:
Not too shabby.
And his latest 10,000 trial computer simulation of the outcome:
All told, it looks really good, yes?
But don't get complacent. This is all rope-a-dope by the GOP. McCain tipped his hand when he said today:
My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them. …
Well, yes, that's true. If you want "them" in a landslide….