Barack Obama Is Trying To Kill Me

Why is Obama trying to give everyone infarctions?

He not only chose Grant Park in Chicago as the venue for his election night party, he announced it two whole weeks ago. It's a ginormous field with only enough trees to hide, say, a company or so of white-robed Klan members who've had plenty of time to get lickered up and load their dingy old vans with lethal weapons. Just look at those trees--I mean, gee-zus!

He's going to give a speech with lights shining on him, and everyone else is going to be in the dark. Saints and rabbis preserve us.

Insert Four Thousand Words Here

Obama and McCain draw the Second Gilded Age to its conclusion at the Alfred E. Smith charity dinner in Manhattan last Friday; McCain talks to Cardinal Egan at said dinner; Obama addresses 100,000+ supporters in St. Louis on Saturday; ditto Kansas City.

Psyche's News Roundup

It's coming at the Pugs fast and furious this week:

A new Quinnipiac has Obama up by 4.

Bush canceled two GOP fundraisers in Alabama and Florida to meet with economic advisers today.

McCain has not spoken to the press corps that follows him in five weeks, or invited national reporters onto his bus in more than two months.

There are now not one but two firmly drawn curtains separating Mr. McCain’s spacious quarters on his plane from the press corps.

(AP) 7 US soldiers die in Iraq in a Chinook crash.

(AP) The Iraqi parliament is deadlocked on the elections law.

(BBC) Maliki questions the future of the US-Iraq SoFA saying there are "serious and dangerous obstacles" to such a deal ever taking place.

(IntNews) The new head of the UN general assembly slams "acts of aggression" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

McCain unintentionally declares Spain an enemy of America to the Spanish press. (TPM 1, 2, 3)

NBC Nightly News (video) tears apart the Palin lies.

ABCNews (video) tears McCain apart over his flip flop on AIG.

Newsweek blasts McCain over "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

The AP's Glenn Johnson hits McCain with an extremely harsh lede blasting him on his insider/outsider claims.

At the UAW plant in Grand Rapids with Palin, the crowd chanted "Sarah, Sarah." They "haven't once screamed for McCain, even after Palin introduced him."

(All via MikeVotes at Born at the Crest.)

Sarah Palin's News Roundup

Believe it or not, I've been arguing for days with various smart folk that the Republican VP choice on McCain's behalf was brilliant. A gamble, sure, but a bold one which shows a real grasp of the country. First off, it was far better than McCain's top picks, ending his ongoing, agonized personal debate between the Toady Party's Joe Lieberman and the Desperate Housewives show's Nicolette Sheridan. Having only met Sarah Palin once, big-on-blondes McCain didn't remember her name and after repeated promptings, got impatient and said, "Whatever! Hey, I'm just the candidate--if Karl Rove says I'll run with a flock of flamingos, what choice do I have?"

Really, though, Rove & Co. outdid themselves on this one. Ha-ha-ha, change? You want change?? Palin is a Fundie who sports an impressive resume for the 80% of America which reads nothing except free People, Us, and tabloid periodicals you find at beauty parlors, dentist offices, church foyers and oil change franchises. She is perfect for the 95% of America that thinks 'Foreign Affairs' refers to the upcoming Boris and Natasha movie starring the "Beef, It's What's for Dinner" spokesman Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson (who recently broke up with Lance Armstrong!).

Palin, a former Alaska runner-up for the Miss America Pageant who married her high-school sweetheart, has also been a sports anchor, a small-town mayor, has 5 children, is a no-rapes-barred pro-lifer, and before being governor of the Toughest State in the Union for the past two years, was Alaska's Oil and Gas Commissioner. She catches salmon, is a former secessionist, wants creationism taught in schools, shoots caribou, hunted bear as a child, she commands the Alaskan National Guard, and was once on a jet that re-fueled in Ireland. People keep telling me how these are bad things, and I reply, "Don't you get it?! This is nothing less than a breakthrough in American Politics. It's like we're primates picking at grubs and the monolith from the movie 2001 appears above us and says, 'Finally--the Trailer Park President has arrived!!'"

Seriously, check your rationality at the door, it doesn't belong inside the US ballot box. Rove & Co has their psychographic act down and the lurps are on the case. Exhibit #227 in How Not to Think About America: Steny Hoyer, US House Majority Wet Noodle, last Friday called Palin "a worse choice for VP than Dan Quayle." Precisely, Steny my shell-shocked glossolalia victim, precisely. Quayle, back in those distant, beatific days of Acadia, was famous only for his ingratiating dumbness and cheerful blondeness, and if I remember correctly, he became George Bush Senior's Vice President after they won the god-damned election together, Steny you good-for-nothing Congress-bastard! (Calm, soothing thoughts, breezes, pretty butterflies landing on flowers.) So...what kind of sick elitist allows themselves to go around being called "Steny," anyway?

Now the Republicans have an improved, supercharged version of Dan Quayle. In fact, to the evangelicals, Palin makes Dan Quayle look like Dustin Hoffman when he played 'Rainman.' As America's first VPILF, she did not disappoint, delivering her acceptance speech, "I Will Break America's Glass Ceiling With These Award-Winning Breasts" to thunderous applause while McCain (I am not kidding) approved of her nether regions. She has dominated the media play ever since, even fueling wild speculations she covered for her daughter Bristol by claiming her illegitimate Down's Syndrome baby as her own. Jesus, you just can't make this stuff up.

Yeah, she has a few scandals going and is insane in that special way that's so common among people who long for Armageddon. But she gave a speech in Texas (back in April, when she was already being considered as the VP pick) apparently with amniotic fluid leaking down her leg, then she hopped a 10-hour flight to Alaska so her commercial fisherman husband could drive her to their little home-town hospital and she could have a baby. That might have been incredibly dumb, but far more importantly it was tough. The Fundies aren't disturbed by a pregnant teenager here, a fired ex-brother-in-law there. C'mon. They identify with that shit, and they will reach for their unmaxed credit cards to give money to the McCain campaign when their preachers tell them to.

Let's face it: Sarah Palin is someone right wing evangelicals, the biggest political force in American history, can get behind. And that's not even getting into her possible resonance with women. It'll be very interesting to see how the scandals play out, but the ones on the table right now probably don't shake core appeal. (And since when have scandals prevented most Republicans from getting elected?) Presidential politics are emotional politics, and whichever way you slice it, naming a Fundie as VP reinvigorates The Base--something a McCain, a Romney, a Lieberman, a Pawlenty could never do. I predict that the next McCain announcement will be that they've raised more donations than in any month before.

(Update Shocker: The atheists who run Us magazine came out with a hard-hitting cover that's on the stands now, themed 'Babies, Lies, & Scandal.' The word you're looking for Mitt Romney, is schadenfreude. Watch for it on your next supermarket trip, with bonus reportage on other shocking teen pregnancies.)

(Update Shocker 2: The NYT is reporting his team couldn't move Oldfinger off his Lieberman Fixation until just 2 weeks ago. Infighting would explain the story's theme of incomplete vetting, making it more likely Palin hoodwinked 'em on something big. Here's hopin'!)

"The Arc of The Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice"

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Damn You, Hillary, For Making Me Like You!

I listened to Hillary Clinton's post-keynote speech while Lord Wife and her staff of loyal servants watched it. La Clintonessa belted out a rejuvenated, unshackled voice, gleefully throwing combination shots at McCain and the Republicans while claiming her propers for being the most successful female candidate for President in United States history, finally throwing her full weight behind Obama.

In my office corner, I was looking at how she formulated. She pulled out all the stops in her preparation, calling back at least two former White House speech writers from their day jobs, one from a production executive position at Sony Pictures, then working on it non-stop for six weeks. It made the back-room context start to mesh. Biden's good history with Hillary, his sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act (which could have been more kindly named), and his roundtable participations with women at the convention indicate that the Obama advisors figured it was more Electorally Important to capture her supporters than reach for the Redneck Vote. VP candidates Warner, Kaine, Webb and Sebelious would've helped in that regard, but they may not have been able to deliver a single state, so I hereby yield my populist, non-arcane revulsions to Biden as VP; we don't elect Presidents as a nation, we elect them state by state, and the Obama campaign is well-organized enough to have made the correct calculations. (By the way, hello, Florida! Thanks for Bush in 2000. Now meet Global Warming.)

What I've always liked about Hillary Rodham Clinton is how she's willing to work her butt off. I can carp about that trait being common enough amongst narcissistic megalomaniacs, but it's not typical in that group, far from it. She's not the best manager, but by the force of her will is a formidable individual achiever, and she only lost her party's nomination because she was out-foxed and ran out of states. She's smart, she hustles, and she has the required cram-it-down studiousness of a great future Secretary of State, a position I wholeheartedly advocate. My gut tells me she's the equal of Kissinger, maybe even a Talleyrand. She's the potential Meryl Streep of diplomacy, and for our sakes I hope she fills that Cabinet role. American corporate interests aren't going to change soon, but who you have at the negotiating table matters a great deal, matters crucially. We need someone of her caliber there, compared to the one-track-mind mediocrity we're suffering from now.

Her speech immediately garnered praise from Keith Olbermann as a Grand Slam for Democratic unity, a verdict which reverberated through Old Media and ran completely opposite to the previously dominant narrative arc of tension between the camps. The construction, content, and delivery of her performance seemed to come from deep press management Kung Fu, first to last. It was savvy, pushed all the right buttons, filling media maws deliciously and giving them much to chew on, anticipating reactions and setting the tone for a party finding its purpose.

The weakness of the Republican Party now is that they're slow. They're may be experts at going negative, and Karl Rove's deputy smear-meister Steve Schmidt has shaved 6 points off Obama's Gallup Poll leads since he took over as McCain's campaign manager in July, but they're media, not internet. They understand the old electorate, not the new. McCain himself is like an old boxer. Never a champion, always a contender, he's formulaic, loose on the message, slow to react. Punch-drunk. Schmidt has tried to limit these liabilities by taking McCain out of the campaign, protecting him, exposing him to only 38 minutes of total reporter time last week. McCain should be town-halled, debated in various cities, bewildered, and peppered with detail questions out of left field. He can't be prepped to react appropriately and will tire quickly. For example, he can't extemporaneously say anything sensible on health care, the big Moose On the Table campaign issue.

Hillary can be a big asset in forcing them to play to weakness and react in real time. The Pugs need eight hours or so to counter-punch, they're up all night right now, and tomorrow morning Steve Schmidt's talking points will probably be: "She was too good. The Dims are so screwed up, they've got the wrong nominee."

Obama Perfects Looking-Off-Into-Future Pose

Subtle muscular adjustments can show, from left above, wistfulness, determination, and unbridled hopefulness.

CHICAGO—As the 2008 presidential election draws closer, Democrat Barack Obama has reportedly been working tirelessly with his top political strategists to perfect his looking-off-into-the-future pose, which many believe is vital to the success of the Illinois senator's campaign.

When performed correctly, the pose involves Obama standing upright with his back arched and his chest thrust out, his shoulders positioned 1.3 feet apart and opened slightly at a 14-degree angle, and his eyes transfixed on a predetermined point between 500 and 600 yards away. Advisers say this creates the illusion that Obama is looking forward to a bright future, while the downturned corners of his lips indicate that he acknowledges the problems of the present.

"The senator spends six hours a day gazing resolutely off into the distance," said chief political strategist David Axelrod, who regularly analyzes video of the pose with Obama, pinpoints areas that need improvement, and makes necessary tweaks.

"It is critical to get every detail right," Axelrod continued. "If he looks up an inch too high, he appears aloof or confused. If he looks down too low, it appears that he is distracted by something in the back of the auditorium. If the curvature of his upper lip is not at the exact 0.87-centimeter radius, it reads that he does not care about preserving the environment for future generations."

The pose also requires Obama to arch his eyebrows at 32-degree angles, open his mouth to prevent the misconception that he is frowning about the future, and briefly flare his nostrils to convey faith in the nation's children.

He must then clench his jaw with sufficient force to express strength and decisiveness—if he uses too much force, Axelrod said, his supraorbital forehead vein becomes visible and makes it appear as though he is in physical pain.

"Every millimeter of that head vein costs him 150,000 votes," Axelrod said.

To complete the pose, Obama must then open his eyes at an aperture of 1.43 centimeters, tilt his chin slightly upward, and rotate his head 37 degrees to the left. His advisers stressed that he must always look to the left.

"When you look to the future, you look to the left," Axelrod said. "Looking to the right is an I-am-sorry-for-the-mistakes-I've-made-in-the-past-but-promise-to-work-my-hardest-for- this-great-nation-from-now-on pose. It's too early for that."

The biggest obstacle Obama has had to overcome in recent weeks is his proclivity to squint while looking toward the future, which aides say alienates voters.

"We've worked on the squinting," said Obama adviser Sam Hosking, who claimed it was a "death knell" for a candidate to appear to be struggling to see the nation's future. "It took a lot of work, but we were able to turn the squint into a solemn blink."

"The blink humanizes him," Hosking added. "But you have to be careful. Two blinks and people will start to question if he's a man of his word."

(There's even more at The Onion, the newspaper that made Madison famous.)

Obama Talks To His Chicago Staff

Normally I figure that readers who come here visit the big political blogs and see more or less the same stuff I do, if not more. But in case, just in case you didn't see this YouTube footage of Obama talking to the staffers at his Chicago headquarters after winning the Democratic nomination, it's worth repeating here.

I'm putting it up for viewing (despite being 13 minutes long) because I know that leaders matter more than systems. What gets focused on, what gets followed up on, what gets decided on and what gets done are the province of leadership, and those are all inseparable functions of the beliefs, the prejudices, and the desires of a real person. It goes right down to how their neurons fired, and how their mothers held them when they were a child.

The video provides a different view into a campaign and a politician, one from the backside. It looks soft-spoken, calm, determined, powerful, respectful, and purposeful. Whether Barack Obama is genuine or not is for you to decide, but he's displaying exceptional leadership in the clip, laying out what he expects in the coming months both from the Republicans and from his own people. You get to see why, maybe, things have worked out the way they have so far. Let's hope it's a little taste of better things to come.

Quickee VP Non-Speculation

Lots of speculation today about Hillary Clinton's non-concession last night. Many support her for VP as a way to heal the party and bring in the "hard-working white people" vote. Some smart folk opine that she kept the race open and sent supporters back to her web site, ostensibly to tell her what she should do next, as a way to pay down some of her campaign's $30 million debt. Other long-time Clinton supporters aren't waiting, many having defected today, and the DNC's home page has a picture of Obama (the one above) announcing his status as nominee.

Various problems exist with a Hillary VP scenario, and the biggest is procedural: candidates for VP are required to present exhaustive documentation designed to vet them and protect the presidential nominee from taint before and after an election. For some reason, the Clintons have a big problem with transparency, and all the donors to their presidential foundation, all the business deals that gave them $120+ million of income over the past 8 years would have to be examined under clinically harsh light. That's a big hurdle, probably a show-stopper.

Even if that were cleared, an Obama presidency with Hillary Clinton as VP would set Operation Enduring Scandal in motion. While it's possible that Bill would stop blowing up at reporters for writing about his indiscretions, stop whoring across the globe on Ron Burkle's 757 (christened 'Air F*** One' by aides), neither is it bloody likely. You can't just imprison the man in a dungeon for four years, he's an ex-President...although that must have crossed a few minds, Hillary's not the least. He is simply an unacceptable liability.

Caroline Kennedy has been named to Obama's search committee, and she and Michelle Obama have a lot in common: they both despise the Clintons. Finally, although she would take it, Hillary Clinton doesn't really even want the spot--a mere Vice Presidency is obviously not big enough to contain her goals, and putting her there would be like having a cobra in your backpack. (Note per Jon: That is to say, she would eagerly take VP, but only as a stepping stone.) She needs more room to run, tasks to perform, someplace where she can deploy her full array of talents. Somewhere like Secretary of State.

Democracy, Its Psychotherapy And Cure

Although it is called such, the United States of America is not and has never been a democracy. In legal writ and practical fact, numerous safeguards have been maintained to ensure against its ever becoming one. Women and blacks still aren't equal, and punishment for being poor now extends into the upper middle class. Still, you never know. Democracy could happen.

Through circumstances which defy convenient explanation, I watched the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee proceedings on C-SPAN Saturday, holed up Howard Hughes-style all high-lonesome in a be-marbled Las Vegas hotel room. Except for dozing off a couple times, I saw the whole thing from about 2/3rds through Florida, and thought the horror show remarkable (almost regrettable) for restraint. Net-net, the HRC campaign was ruled and bylawed into a 50% Michigan-Florida compromise weighting after much twisting and kvetching. I wouldn't normally have watched this, but there was my general immobility to consider, and nothing better was on TV.

At times it looked and felt like an organization falling apart. Imagine, for contrast, if Florida and Michigan had bolted to the front of the Republican Party primary line. Zippo, nada, natch of their votes would be counted. If a couple of wayward states had given the RNC any guff, drunken thugs in pickup trucks would've dragged the offending apparachiks out of their homes in the middle of the night for manure-boarding sessions. The next morning, everybody would show up at the committee meeting shaved, showered, and smiling submissively, and their sole query would be, "Whose ass do I kiss first?" That's unity.

Whereas Democrats know all about diversity. And if any more diversity had gone on at the DNC, Harold Ickes would've dropped trou, shit on the Marriott's rug, started flinging turds at the co-chairs and said, "Look at me, I'm a gorilla!" This from the man who ran the party for 15 years, the incumbency-enhancing architect of the Super Tuesday soiree: "we need to make sure every vote counts." Oh, the passion, lo, the rampant egalitarianism. Listening to Harold, you could just feel liberty's heaving breast swelling to yell out, "Freedom! Freedom!" It was all I could do to not break out into the Pledge of Allegiance.

Simply put, Michigan and Florida Democrats were not well served by their state party leaders; they were insubordinate, intransigent, and insolent, and boy did they get off light. There isn't a leg to stand on: both states had the chance to do the primaries over according to the rules and have all their votes counted; they refused on the grounds of extra expense. A re-vote would have been the right thing to do, yet there wasn't a single word said about it by anyone who spoke into a microphone--curious, no? You could almost see the looming presence of Howard Dean in the ballroom, toying with a five-pound hammer and twirling a thumbscrew. The RBC committee meeting was more about putting down a snitty rebellion than about seating delegates, and the real question was whether the states and a significant, well-entrenched, and deeply unhappy faction would recognize the DNC's future authority.

In that context, the meeting's transparency was truly courageous--I can't imagine the RNC would allow live coverage in a similar situation. The committee's discipline was awesome, betraying guidelines that had been very well-rehearsed; it would have been easy, even natural, to rub the state reps' noses in messes of their own making, messes they had no excuse for. Although ironies and hypocrisies were flying fast and thick, that didn't happen. The most Shylockian propositions were accorded respect, and most anyone with a passing familiarity with Democratic party track record would've found it impossible to deaden impulses to derision without powerful incentives. For example, to the unremitting mantra of "disenfranchising voters?" Give me a break. Forty years ago the Dims settled on a nominee a full year before a ballot was cast.

Paradoxically, votes and involvement mattered more this time than in any other Democratic primary; campaigning mattered more; organization mattered more. As a brand, Clinton was as well-known as you can get, so she was not prepared for America's first real 50-state nomination fight. Everywhere Obama went, he closed the gap. He was down in Wisconsin by 20+ points in January. He traveled there and won it by 17 points. He was down by 24 in Virginia, began visiting, and eventually won it by 28. He was down by 20 in Pennsylvania three weeks before its primary, made a hasty tour and closed it to 9. The more exposure he got, the more votes he won. That's what happens in real democracies, that's the quality you want to see in your party's leader, and that's why the faithful have told Hillary Clinton to act like Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. Yes, your dead-enders want to fight on as an insurgency. Tell them to go home and plant crops.

The RBC's final vote bore the feel of a previous internal compromise and a carefully foregone conclusion. What was needed was done. Furthermore, it was the only actual open debate about an election or its processes which has occurred in my lifetime, and to my knowledge ever in these United States. I'm not sure of the full impact or follow-through, but that alone is no small thing. The DNC conspiracy, if such it was, expressed an even-handed but resounding "enough!" It gave the signal for the Clintons to pass the torch to a new kind of party, and it's going to be one far more representative and open than it has ever been before.

Edwards Endorses Obama; Now For Some VP Speculation

The timing of the endorsement was either fortuitous or great planning, a maul used to blunt momentum from the Clinton victory, their largest margin yet, in West Virginia last night. (Where Edwards got 7% of the vote.) Edwards supplies 18 regular delegates to the Obama numbers, which would put him over 1,900 total and within ten of a simple regular-delegate majority of 1,627. The important psychological delegate number is 2,000, not 2,026, and Obama now only has to get 30% of the remaining uncommitted pool. You always have to wonder what price was paid, and the VP slot would seem a little steep. A Cabinet position would be reasonable, and Edwards would be the most progressive Attorney General imaginable.

Now the winnowing process begins for the running mate. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia (retired Navy Commander, son served two tours in Iraq, took seat away from a Republican incumbent) offers a great suite of gap-fillers. But he's a first-termer from Congress. Ohio's governor Ted Strickland has been bandied about because he closes all the obvious gaps--he now runs a key state that has trended Republican, is moderate, well-respected, over 60, white and got an 'A' rating from the National Rifle Association. But he's a Clinton supporter, which may discount him, and also a first-termer, which doesn't help the inexperience angle.

So, looking down the list of Democratic state governors, there aren't many that fit the bill as nicely as Tennessee's Phil Bredeson. He brings everything Strickland does and a boatload more: he started Health America, which became a 6,000-employee publicly traded health care management company; he is noted for spending wisely on education programs; he's a Presbyterian from smack dab in the demographic and region Obama has struggled in; he won his last gubernatorial election 69-30; and he does not draw his gubernatorial salary. He's a small-town boy from Appalachia made good with the credibility, physics degree, contacts, and drive to take on the health care mess.

Travis Childers Delivers Big Democratic Win In Mississippi

In a district which went 62-38 for Bush in 2004, the AP calls a tight race for Democrat Travis Childers in Mississippi. It's a win for the DCCC and a symbolic win for Obama in the staunchly conservative Mississippi 1st district. This is big; by comparison, Hillary Clinton's thumping victory in West Virginia is a sideshow. Tonight's Mississippi miracle will shake the Republican Party to its core, because it recently lost two other "lock" races and the RNC pulled out all the stops to firewall this one. Haley "Where's My Dinnah?" Barbour is also the Republican governor. His famed appetite must be suffering, and he's probably wearing a plus-size adult diaper right about now.

In race-baiting beamed forward in time from the Reconstruction era, Obama was used as a boogeyman by the Pugs; Childers had aligned himself with the new sheriff in town, counting on new voter turnout to win. It worked. This is what the RNC leadership had to say about this race, coming on the heels of special-elections defeats in stronghold seats in Louisiana and Illinois, including the one held by former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert:

"When you connect three dots in anything, that's a bad thing. This connects the dots. At that point, everybody's got to come together and have a come-to-Jesus meeting," said Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), a retiring centrist who will help form a new advisory panel at the National Republican Congressional Committee.

"It's a time of sober reflection and, to some extent, resolve. I hope these special elections are a wake-up call," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), the leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee.

"The Republicans would be ignoring reality if they try to explain away this race," said Nathan Gonzales, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.

Note to the NRCC: Jesus will kick your butt through the goalposts of life. Increasingly it looks to this political late bloomer that the Republicans may be facing a historic landslide with Barack Obama at the head of a ticket which mobilizes and enfranchises a new, post-baby boom generation of voters. It's also a clear indication of how far the Global War on Terra has eroded the pylons of the so-called conservative Base. In a way I almost wish this "connect the dots" win hadn't happened just yet. Because if they lost here, Republican strategists know they can lose anywhere. Everywhere. They're a smart, professional group adeptly fond of rigging elections, they're out of excuses, and the unequivocal outcome forms an urgent new question to keep them up at night: "How are we going to suppress that much more vote?"

Fill In The Blank

The map above plots all the individual counties in the United States that the Clintons won by 20% or more in this Democratic primary. It closely resembles the migration path of settlers southward and westward circa 1830-1860. Fascinating, some very deep-rooted Americana at work here, but I won't go there. It'd be great to hear a demographer like Joel Garreau (who wrote The Nine Nations of North America) take a crack at an explanation.

Why John McCain Is Doomed

The United States has been at war in the Mid-East for almost 7 years. That war was always enormously misguided, craven, and expensive, always was going to be. Just as predictably, we've lost that romp of incompetence although few seem prepared to admit it yet. Six years ago, very few people, and far fewer politicians, were mentally "with it" enough to point at the Big Picture. Even now, for fun and profit the tatterdemalion media prefer to focus on tactics, which factors to multiply which way: "Candidate X does better with bowlers, Candidate Y does well with eaters of seaweed. In other news, Occupied Country Z is opening an amusement park." Ad captandum vulgus, ad infinitum. It's like reading the titles of books as they're driven off their shelves by an earthquake.

Of course the longing for (some say the manufacture of) a new lion can be traced back to the disasters of the old. Yet perhaps it's more the Moment itself which calls new lions forth. Who we elect will, amongst other things, determine whether we can cut the atmosphere's CO2 levels enough to stop playing "The Ghosts of Mars" with Mother Earth, or whether we end up getting nuked or not. Little decisions, big outcomes.

Hillary Clinton supported the war, and her big backers support the war. John McCain supported the war, and his big backers support the war. That's why they will lose. They'll lose because they've been bought and paid for, they'll lose to someone we've bought and paid for. They'll lose because they'll never give this speech:

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.I don’t oppose all wars.

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars.

And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.

He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the President today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.

The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not – we will not – travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

The Barack Obama Train: Climb Aboard

Although the Obama campaign has let people know there will be no dancing in the end zone over Tuesday's 15-delegate net victory in North Carolina and Indiana, cheering is allowed. "Presumptive Nominee" is now the operative phrase. In fact, the cheering was heard all the way down in the US House of Representatives yesterday. An impromptu, extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented event took place, one whose tea leaves provide excellent reads. In short, Congress acts as if Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. Still hard to believe, isn't it? All you need to do is suspend its opposite. If we want to win, it's time to shift focus from one fight, and line up behind who's left standing for the next.

He was in the Senate when he cell-phoned undeclared Pennsylvania superdelegate Rep. Robert A. Brady, who asked him to stop by and say hello to him in the House chambers. Obama took him up on the offer, heading over to shake hands, saying, "See, Bob, I listen to you sometimes." Brady joked back, "You got to listen to me all the time," and then a full-on case of Obama-mania broke out, right there in the holy chamber. Representatives mobbed the candidate, with supporters and opponents alike jostling for some face time.

Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) had him autograph a copy of the NY Daily News, which had "It's His Party" on the cover. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y., a Clinton backer), and Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) gave him bear hugs. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) later said she was escorting three elementary school students onto the House floor when Obama made his entrance. "It's Barack Obama!," they shouted out in unison, and Ros-Lehtinen took them over to meet the Senator from Illinois. “The kids were very excited,” said Ros-Lehtinen. “Like rock star excited.” Ros-Lehtinen has publicly advocated the assassination of elected Mid-East leaders, yet even she got caught up in the optimism. More Republicans crossed the aisle to greet and congratulate, all saying, "We're looking forward to working with you." (Suspending that disbelief yet?) More from Politico:

Obama posed for photos with giddy pages on the staircase leading up to the House gallery. The normally staid and deferential pages, who walk the halls quietly on their best behavior, returned the favor, giving Obama a rousing ovation. Security guards reprimanded reporters and tourists for snapping photos with their phones — something that is strictly forbidden in many parts of the chamber unless you are a credentialed photographer — but to little avail.

Barack Obama took the pledged superdelegate lead away from Hillary Clinton (as ABC was first to report), gaining 9 superdelegates today alone. 117 such delegates endorsed him since February 5th, a 6-1 margin over Clinton in that period. He was winning the fundamental fight for the heart of a party which had become known for its ineffectual cowardice, a quality seemingly impervious to an appealing but uncertain Morpheus. Yet it happened. People, many of whose political lives depended on the Clintons, kept reaching for the Red Pill.

As that shift took place, I could feel the sheer weight and tectonic rumbles of a much larger turning. I sometimes caught myself thinking back to when I was a kid of 10 or so, riding in the backseat of a Mercedes sedan when my stepfather said to my mother of me, "He's a nigger-lover." All sorts of emotions passed through then, confusion, sadness, fear, anger, doubt, and ultimately, disappointment and profound embarrassment. I said nothing, but one statement contains so much, and it felt just like I've felt about this country through much of the intervening years. So yes, Dad, wherever you are, I am what you accused, here is the future that you feared. And I've made a donation of $50 to Barack Obama in your name.

When people look back, they'll say how obvious it all was, how latently etched it was in the marble of our country's monuments. So often, right when things happen in the now, their eventual impacts and echoes are not so obvious, and must be incrementally processed, extruded like ores recovered from the diaphanous parts of ourselves, the parts which live outside time, to smelt down encircling spirits into hard mortal symbols which make sense. Walk in enough cemeteries, and you'll see a virgin Mary. Yet historical impact can be as obvious as a rock upside the head, as noisy as a Civil War cannonade, nonsensical as a sermon on a mount, expansive as the day an African-American man walked out through the Capitol Building in the whitest country in the world trailing a throng of reporters, and visitors broke the muttering, whispering, sepulchral silence of its high white dome to yell across it, "Barack! Go get 'em, Barack!!"

The Empire Strikes Back

This very funny video about a pretty serious topic has been watched almost a million times by Youtubers. Fun stuff sent on by Still Life Living.

Bitterland

I drove across Pennsylvania only once, heading east at edgy speeds with the object of making it into work Monday morning in New Jersey. Having left Seattle on Friday evening, I was admittedly feeling the strain, but what really got me was the state's deceptively vast topography. Once you're out of Pittsburgh, there's big long stretches of rocks and trees, not much traffic, and of the lights you see in the dark, most shine out from burbling rigs of long-haul truckers.

Traversing that state was like crossing the Kingdom of Bocephus Klein, its wild terrain conjuring images of war-painted savages attacking Conestoga wagons, making the environs of South Dakota seem chock-full of sophisticates. After midnight when I got The Nods, it was hard to find a place, any place, with a bed--a simple task in even the sparsest reaches of my neighboring home-state, which can get pretty sparse indeed. Sparse? Hell, it was as if space invaders took out a giant vacuum and sucked up all the people. By the time I found a motel, my status had been downgraded to 'Road Hazard,' and I was almost in New Jersey.

Tomorrow's democratic primary will probably be decided in that central section of Pennsylvania, where easy prospects are faded memories and self-reliance is tattooed on the faces of men like hearts that say 'Mom.' If I hadn't driven across it, I'd be far more inclined to take the P.A. polls on their numbers, which have Hillary Clinton ahead of Barack Obama by as much as 15 points. Even though she has much of the party machine's backing there and counts both the governor and Philadelphia's mayor as fervent supporters, a number of factors may have eluded polling to make the contest surprisingly close:

1) Lots of Newly Registered Democrats
Democrats have gained 326,756 PA voters since a year ago, and the Republicans have lost 73,009. Two bellwether Republican counties, Bucks and Montgomery, have gone Democrat for the first time in living memory. Speaking of which, Hillary Clinton has been a national figure for quite some time, so she's probably not the attractant.

2) Newly Registered Voters Trend Away From Clinton
This is why Obama is winning the national contest, and a poll by Franklin and Marshall College found that almost two-thirds of new Pennsylvania Democratic registrants in the past 3 months plan to vote for Obama.

3) Clinton's Peaking Negatives
Public perception is an odd beast; H.R.C. is the same person who was fired for lying on her first legal case back in 1974, and few laurels for truth have festooned her since. Yet the polled negatives rose by double digits via the euphroes of Bosnian embellishment; this will be the first primary since they were exposed. Her low-trustworthy scores will cast a chill on both undecideds and swing Republicans, and these are probably the chief termites in her numbers, down from 20+ a month ago.

4) Obama's Counterpunches
The "Gotcha" Debate went almost an hour before a non-bizarre question was asked. If an erstwhile moderator asks you, "Does your reverend beat his wife less than you do yours," it sucks, but it does give you occasion to fire back. Referring back to point 3), HRC has a political glass jaw, one that can't take more than a light jab. Early on, Obama resisted his staff's urgings and said, "I'm not going to knee-cap her," rightly believing a positive-message campaign played to his greater advantage. Going negative departs from message, but it's effective. As the Clinton "Kitchen" ad plays today (in which images of Osama bin Laden figure prominently), he finally hit her on trustworthiness.

5) Republicans Can't Vote Against Obama
Pennsylvania is a closed primary. That means the Limbaugh Factor at play in Ohio and Texas is largely void. Because Ohio and Texas hold open primaries, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh (amongst others) urged his listeners to cross party lines and vote for Hillary so the Democrats would "bleed each other white" and hand McCain victory in November. Figuring out how big an effect the anti-voting had in Ohio is speculation, but because of the multi-staged system in Texas, it can easily be inferred. Obama won the mailed ballots 57-42 to take an early lead, lost the general open vote by a steadily eroding margin, and yet handily won the subsequent caucuses to win the state. Odd? The math works out when you factor in the 600,000 self-described "strong conservatives" who voted in Texas' democratic primary. It won't happen in Pennsylvania.

The stilted, drawn-out primary pace, the birth of a new, as-yet-unchristened political current, and the roiling lobscouse of a ravenous media randomly muting and amplifying deeply rocked intangibles have given pollsters a rough time throughout these contests. Obama may not win tomorrow, and my political prognostications are as bad as anyone else's, but it's really, really hard to see how Clinton could muster enough enthusiasm in Pennsylvania's sprawling central belly to achieve more than stalemate there. To have a slim chance of staying in the delegate hunt she has to win by 15+, and the margin will be tighter. If it's only by 5, 6, 7, the race is effectively over. A bumper sticker floats in my mind's eye: I'm Amish, And I Vote.

They Really Need An Opponent Soon

Advisers to Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain watch as press secretary Brooke Buchanan tosses an orange down the aisle during a bowling game on board the campaign charter airplane, Friday, April 11th, 2008.

(Via picture of the day at Born at the Crest of Empire, now linked to in right margin.)

Speak Up, I Can't Hear The Words "Mark Penn"

The caption for this photo was:

(Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cups her ear as reporters ask her about Mark Penn, the pollster and senior strategist for Clinton's presidential bid who left the campaign Sunday, at the airport in Albuquerque, N.M., Sunday, April 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

By cupping her ear, what a prankster, she was apparently a joke of dodging reporters questions. Or maybe it was a way of expressing cognitive dissonance. The Clinton campaign has paid nearly 10% of all the money it has raised to Mark Penn, at least $13 million of $141 million. Penn is the author of the best-selling 'Microtrends,' a book about...umm, how small details explain everything? How little acorns become great oaks? How Fourier transforms applied to long-tailed stochastically-smoothed trendlines uncover power laws which foretell the future? I dunno what the thing's about, but will learn fast. Anyone who can shake the Clintons down for that much dough and not wind up dead deserves some quality time.

The rumpus is that Penn got into hot water for peddling influence to a foreign client, the government of Colombia, which is all aflame to get congressional approval on its bilateral free trade agreement. Bush sent the bill to the legislature today, along with a few now-customary insults. Why the hot water? Well, because H.C. is now expressly against anything containing the words "free trade agreement" (and don't you forget it, bub). As to why either Penn or Columbia should even want such a thing, I surely don't know. You'd think being Most Favored Cocaine Supplier would be enough for Colombia, and in Penn's case $13 million for doing some mumbo-jumbo special polls (and the sage advice to not bother running in caucus states) was pretty swell, too. So the New York Times and other sources reported that Penn was forced out.

But, not so fast, the Clintons aren't bothering to actually fire Penn. He was on the Monday campaign conference call as usual, and his firm will continue to be their pollster. So he's not resigned, not fired, not leaving, his firm's still getting paid, and he's just sort of helicoptering around like some Bellisarius of Bullshit. Man, this guy's good. I wonder what Obama is paying him? Unfortunately this means I'll have to read his other book: 'Winning Through Conflicts of Interest.'

(Much of this info came from Born at the Crest of Empire, a sharp blogger.

Clinton Compares Herself To Rocky Balboa: 'We Have A Lot In Common'

Honest, a mole in their campaign did not tell me last Friday Hillary was set to go Balboa:

PHILADELPHIA — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she has something in common with legendary film boxer Rocky Balboa _ she's not a quitter.

Recalling a famous scene on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from the 1976 Oscar-winning film "Rocky," Clinton said that ending her presidential campaign now would be as if "Rocky Balboa had gotten halfway up those art museum steps and said, 'Well, I guess that's about far enough.'"

"Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people," Clinton said in excerpts of prepared remarks to be given Tuesday to a meeting of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO.