Democracy for Utah - 2008 Presidential Election

Obama campaign preempts McCain's smears

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:36:05 -0600

Where the hell were these people in 2000? (Politico):

Branding his opponent as "erratic in a crisis," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is preempting plans by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to portray him as having sinister connections to controversial Chicagoans.

[...] Obama isn't waiting to respond. His campaign is going up Monday on national cable stations with a scathing ad saying: "Three quarters of a million jobs lost this year. Our financial system in turmoil. And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy. No wonder his campaign wants to change the subject." [...]

"We think the McCain campaign made a huge error by telling the press that their strategy was to distract from the most important issue facing voters," a senior Obama official said. "Every attack going forward will be easy to characterize for what it is — an attempt to distract from the Bush-McCain economic record."

Desperate McCain campaign promises October will be ugly

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:24:40 -0600

Washington Post:

Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said. [...]

"We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here," said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Digby adds:

This is what heroes with honor and integrity do. A true patriot will always try to change the subject by smearing his opponent's character, particularly during a time of crisis.

'When men were free' to not have Medicare

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:55:59 -0600

So you might remember Palin's powerful closing statement from last night (via Ezra Klein):

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

Inspiring, huh? Well, it turns out that quote was from — I am not making this up — a recording Reagan did in 1961 to convince doctors' wives to oppose Medicare.

The doctor begins to lose freedom. ... First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. [...]

You and I can do this. The only way we can do it is by writing to our congressman even if we believe he's on our side to begin with. Write to strengthen his hand. Give him the ability to stand before his colleagues in Congress and say, I heard from my constituents and this is what they want. And if you don't do this and if I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

Freedom according to Ronald Reagan means the freedom to be denied coverage by your health insurance company.

Obama increases his lead with women voters

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:35:36 -0600

TIME:

Among the poll's most dramatic findings: McCain is losing female voters faster than Sarah Palin attracted them after the Republican National Convention. Obama leads McCain by 17 points with women, 55%-38%. Before the conventions, women preferred Obama by a margin of 10 points, 49%–39%. After McCain picked Palin as his running mate, the gap narrowed to a virtual tie, with Obama holding a 1-point margin, 48%–47%.

In a stark indication of just how much the political landscape has changed over the past four years, white women now favor Obama by three points, 48%–45%; in 2004, George W. Bush won the same demographic by 11 points against John Kerry. Where Bush carried married women by 15 points in that election, 57%–42%, Obama now leads by 6 points, 50%–44%, a 21-point shift.

So how's that Sarah Palin pick working out?

Unserious

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:34:44 -0600

So the Biden-Palin debate is over and neither one committed any obvious gaffes. And Palin did better than her interviews with Katie Couric, but that bar is so low you can't even see it.

What struck me about Palin's performance was how unserious it was. Of course I'm not impartial, but... her demeanor was exactly like a chirpy TV newscaster. Same cadences, same head tilts, same relentless eye contact with the camera, same regularly timed smiles. We've had a horrible two weeks in this country and she looked like she just flew in from Happy Land. And WTF was up with the winking? Has any presidential candidate in history ever winked at the camera? Three times?!

I can't see how undecided voters would feel better about a McCain-Palin ticket after that performance.

An unangry man

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:01:58 -0600

Joe Klein in TIME:

Part of Obama's steadiness is born of necessity: An angry, or flashy, black man isn't going to be elected President. But I've also gotten the sense, in the times I've interviewed and chatted with him, that calm is Obama's natural default position. He is friendly, informal, accessible... and a mystery, hard to get to know. He doesn't give away much, doesn't — unlike Bill Clinton — have that desperate need to make you like him.

His brilliant, at times excessive, oratory is an outlier — the only over-the-top, Technicolor quality he has. There has been no grand cathartic moment for him in this campaign, but rather a steady accretion of trust, a growing public sense that he knows what he's talking about and isn't going to get crazy on us. His demeanor has rendered foolish all the rumors about his alleged radicalism. This guy is the furthest thing imaginable from an extremist; McCain, by his own admission, is the bomb-thrower in this race.

McCain is apparently happy with his government health insurance

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:56:27 -0600

Ezra Klein:

[A]s a 72-year-old who's healthy enough to run for president, there's no evidence that McCain has ever experienced a day of dissatisfaction with his health care coverage. Indeed, as the husband of an heiress, McCain could easily have stepped out into the private market — the very market he wants all Americans to use — and bought another plan for him and his wife, so he wouldn't have to deal with the government system any longer. There's no evidence he did that, either.

McCain's problem is not simply that he's been on government health insurance his whole life. It's that, by all accounts and appearance, he's been quite satisfied with his coverage. His complaints are all of a general nature. "I've always been a free enterprise person" or "my opponent wants to create a health care bureaucracy." Never "I've been on Medicare for years now, and it's a house of horrors."

Rolling Stone: McCain 'reckless and dishonest'

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:53:51 -0600

Rolling Stone pulls all of McCain's character flaws into one article:

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

Actuarial company says a two-term McCain would have 1 in 4 chance of dying in office

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:50:06 -0600

AP:

An Atlanta actuarial company specializing in individualized estimates of life and health expectancy has run the numbers for McCain, 72, and Obama, 47. The firm, Bragg Associates, calculated the odds of the candidates dying in office, adjusted for their known health problems.

McCain would be the oldest president to begin a first term in office. By the end of a second term, Jan. 20, 2017, he would have a 24.44 percent chance of dying, compared with 5.76 percent for Obama, the firm estimates.

McCain fails to achieve a bipartisan consensus

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:29:50 -0600

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog on today's failed bailout vote:

McCain returned to Washington to get a deal and get House Republicans on board. We got the deal, even though McCain stayed home and then went to dinner with [Joe] Lieberman instead of joining the actual negotiators on the Hill, and then when the vote came up today, the majority of Republicans voted against the bill and killed it. The majority of Democrats voted for the bill. Had the majority of Republicans done the same, it would have passed.

John McCain supported this bill, [so] why was he unsuccessful in getting House Republicans to join? Why? Because they hate him. All the Republicans hate McCain. McCain isn't a maverick as much as he's a loner. People don't like him. And the canard that he was going to somehow bring everyone together in a bipartisan manner was, well, just that, a joke. And today we saw the extent of McCain's great powers to bring people together. McCain crash-landed into Washington and blew up the talks. Then he failed to deliver when he promised he could get his party on board. John McCain was just tested, and failed.

As Putin rears his head into U.S. air space...

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:01:26 -0600

Apparently this is what Sarah Palin was talking about (via Daily Kos):

"As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska." –Sarah Palin

Obama's understanding of strategy vs. tactics

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:46:51 -0600

James Fallows at The Atlantic:

The audience that matters [for a debate] is people who start out undecided or uncertain — and finally are looking for emotional reassurance about who they can imagine as president for the next four years. In general, such viewers are only now starting to pay serious attention to the campaign — in contrast to people already committed to helping (or stopping) one of the candidates.

[...] Obama either figured out, or instinctively understood, that the real battle was to make himself seem comfortable, reasonable, responsible, well-versed, and in all ways "safe" and non-outsiderish to the audience just making up its mind about him. [...] The evidence of the polls suggests that he achieved exactly this strategic goal. He was the more "likeable," the more knowledgeable, the more temperate, etc. [...]

For years and years, Democrats have wondered how their candidates could "win" the debates on logical points — that is, tactics — but lose the larger struggle because these seemed too aggressive, supercilious, cold-blooded, or whatever. To put it in tactical/strategic terms, Democrats have gotten used to winning battles and losing wars. Last night, the Democratic candidate showed a far keener grasp of this distinction than did the Republican who accused him of not understanding it.

And more polls are coming in: LA Times/Bloomberg found that undecideds thought Obama looked more presidential by 44%–16%, while Gallup found that independents thought Obama won the debate by 43%–33%.

Another LTE

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:11:30 -0600

Sadly, I am not able to attend many events or donate much money toward Democratic campaigns. So I do little things that I can: talk, talk, talk (I've "converted 3 Republicans, and have ongoing conversations with many others), make phone calls, and I've gotten pretty good at LTE's. I sent this one to a number of Utah papers, plus the NY Timees, Washington Post, and commented on several online sites:

Fact check for the first debate

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:29:19 -0600

Good research from the AP:

MCCAIN: "Dr. Kissinger did not say that he would approve face-to-face meetings between the president of the United States and (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad. He did not say that. He said there could be secretary-level and lower-level meetings. I've always encouraged that."

THE FACTS: Obama was right that Kissinger called for meetings without preconditions. McCain was right that Kissinger did not call for such meetings to be between the two presidents. [...]

MCCAIN: McCain said Obama voted to cut off money for the troops in Iraq.

THE FACTS: Despite opposing the war, Obama has, with one exception, voted for Iraq troop financing. In 2007, he voted against a troop funding bill because it did not contain language calling for a troop withdrawal. The Illinois senator backed another bill that had such language — and money for the troops.

Early polls: Obama won the debate

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:53:28 -0600

I watched the debate at a neighbor's house with a whole room full o' Democrats and one Obama-supporting libertarian. We were all somewhat shocked that McCain did as well as he did, and most of us felt that the debate was essentially a draw. But the early polls are showing a different result.

CBS News:

Immediately after the debate, CBS News interviewed a nationally representative sample of nearly 500 debate watchers assembled by Knowledge Networks who were "uncommitted voters" — voters who are either undecided about who to vote for or who say they could still change their minds. Thirty-nine percent of these uncommitted debate watchers said Obama won the debate. Twenty-four percent said McCain won, and another 37 percent thought it was a tie.

Nearly half of those uncommitted voters who watched the debate said that their image of Obama changed for the better as a result. Just eight percent say their opinion of Obama got worse, and 46 percent reported no change in their opinions. [...]

Why did voters' image of Obama improve? Many volunteered that they were impressed by his poise and knowledge about the issues, that he was more knowledgeable about the issues than they thought previously. When it came to McCain, those same voters said he "didn't control himself well under pressure," that he was "angry and bad-tempered," and that he "talked too much about the past."

CNN also did a poll, but their online article doesn't show what undecideds thought. Their sample is slightly skewed toward Democrats, so the numbers are a little rosy. Still, CNN's respondents said that Obama won the debate by 51% to 38%.

What was the response like at your debate party?