Obama can still win Florida despite the polling gains McCain has made since naming Sarah Palin his running mate, and there is no sign Obama is pulling back in Florida yet. Far from it. Obama allies say he has about 350 paid staffers in the state and about 50 field offices, including in places not known as fertile ground for Democrats, such as Sun City Center, Lake City and Sebring.
But for all the attention to Florida from the Obama campaign, there's little tangible evidence it's paying off.
He is farther behind in the state than John Kerry was at this point in 2004, even though McCain began buying Florida TV ads only last week. By this time in 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign had spent $13-million on Florida TV. In the rolling average of Florida polls compiled by the Web site RealClearPolitics.com, Obama has never taken the lead over McCain in Florida, and the latest average shows him behind by 5 percentage points. They were tied in early August.
The Obama campaign has no organized presence in Southern Ohio; southern Ohio defined as south of Interstate 70 which runs east west and loosely divides the state in half both geographically and culturally. The Obama campaign’s focus of effort is evident in the traditionally Democratic strongholds of northeast Ohio, the Cleveland area and Mahoning Valley, in addition to Franklin County/Columbus in the center of the state.
Certainly these are densely populated areas with huge numbers of Democratic constituents, however, they voted for Clinton in the primary, and even if they have increased the registered democrats in these areas the state still can not be won without a majority of the independent hardscrabble rural voter spread throughout southern Ohio from West Virginia to Indiana. Focusing on Columbus, Cleveland, and Dayton is like campaigning in California; it feels good but we’ve already won there.
Remember, no candidate yet has been able to win without a victory in two of three states: Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. And things are tight in the Keystone State, with Obama showing only a 2-3 point lead.
FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 -- Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."
The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.
Yes, and five years ago you could have said that Palin was wrong. But Anne Kornblut is wrong here; does anybody deny that the soldiers heading over to Iraq are going there to fight Al Qaeda?
Seriously, I used to have some respect for the Washington Post but they've gone overboard for Obama.
She's a "cocky wacko," he told a Washington think tank earlier this week.
Chafee, the lone Senate Republican to vote against the Iraq war who endorsed Obama's White House bid earlier this year, told an audience at the New America Foundation in Washington Tuesday that Palin's selection has energized Obama backers.
"People were coming into my office, phone calls were flooding in, e-mails were coming in, 'I just sent money to Obama, I couldn't sleep last night' — from the left. To see this cocky wacko up there," he said.
Stinkin' Lincoln is a 9-11 "Truther"; he has agreed to serve on an independent panel of kooks and nutbars like Ed Asner, Ralph Shoenman and William Pepper to investigate the terrorist attacks to determine that the US government was behind them.
I commented to my sister today that although I didn't think Obama intentionally told the "lipstick on a pig" joke to refer to Sarah Palin, I did think the rest of what Obama said was just as repugnant, and not getting any play:
After starting off with "you can wrap an old fish in a newspaper and it's still going to stink, he adds:
"Look, she's new, she hasn't been on the scene, she's got five kids. And my hat goes off to anybody whose looking after five. I've got two and they tire Michelle and me out," he said.
The ever-popular backhanded compliment. She's got five kids? Well, one of them is off to Iraq tomorrow. Another is apparently going to get married. She's new on the scene? Barack, we're still getting used to you, too. I realize that after 19 months on the road, you think we should know you, but that's your experience, not ours.
Look, these folks are completely rattled. They thought they'd bring up one or two things about Sarah Palin and everybody'd agree that she was totally unqualified compared to Barack, who after all was editor of Haaaavaaad Law Review. And yet she blew everybody away at the RNC, and is now suddenly the most interesting person in America. There is no comparison. Moose burgers versus arugula? Snow machine races versus basketball? Alaska versus Hawaii?
Just repetition. Check out this hilarious article on how ticked off the rest of the world will be if we don't elect the Lightbringer:
Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.
If McCain wins, he'll face a Democratic congress that's beyond furious. Losing is one thing, but after eight years of George Bush and Karl Rove, losing a vicious campaign like this one will cause Dems to go berserk. They won't even return McCain's phone calls, let alone work with him on legislation. It'll be four years of all-out war.
I confess this guy provided us with some amusement during the primary campaign, but in an interview with Pacifica Radio, he goes a little off-message on Sarah Palin, talking about how she's a great pick, that she's going to come out looking fine on the Troopergate issue, etc.
Okay, the media have gone from simple derangement to outright mania. Check out David Plotz:
When I mentioned my Palin dreams to Slate colleagues, they volunteered their own. One Obama-supporting colleague dreamed she had urged her young son to kill Palin with a string bean. Another dreamed she was at a fashion show and Palin served her crème fraîche on little scooped corn chips. A third says, "In the Sarah Palin dream I keep having, she has superhuman powers but is not really a person at all. In fact, she is more like the weather with glasses and an up-do, pushing clouds around and pitching lightning bolts."
LOL! They go on to urge people to send in their own dreams about Palin. Of course, mine's pretty simple:
I dream I see Sarah Palin standing proudly beside John McCain as he recites the oath of office of the Presidency.
I didn’t want to mention that I had a dream about Sarah Palin (she was driving a piece of farm equipment back and forth on the football field of the high school catty-corner to my house, laughing maniacally and I was trying desperately to install some kind of codec on my laptop so they could capture it on video) because it just seemed to weird and creepy.
Freud would be scribbling frantically in his notebook at this point.
Update II:
I dream of Sarah with the light brown hair, She's driving a tractor, I'm in my underwear...
A week ago the liberals were claiming that she was up there with Tom Eagleton, now she's the undeniable star of the Republican Party. Hey, I'm a McCain man, and I am thrilled he's at the top of the ticket, but part of being a star is being new and Sarah's undeniably new.
Some polls coming out recently undeniably reflect the popularity of the choice. For example, an ABC/Washington Post poll found an incredible swing in support for McCain among white women:
Much of the shift toward McCain stems from gains among white women, voters his team hoped to sway with the pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate. White women shifted from an eight-point pre-convention edge for Obama to a 12-point McCain advantage now.
That's such a staggering result that it seems incredible. Essentially it means that 10% of all white women have changed their support from Obama to McCain.
John McCain's 6 percentage-point bounce in voter support spanning the Republican National Convention is largely explained by political independents shifting to him in fairly big numbers, from 40% pre-convention to 52% post-convention in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.
It's fair to say that Palin isn't doing this all by her lonesome, but she sure ain't a drag on the ticket.
Working mothers in particular should be holding their breath. The McCain camp's decision to pitch Palin's Supermom-of-five status as one of her chief assets has opened yet another front in the endless and endlessly counterproductive Mommy Wars. The moment Palin's addition to the ticket was announced, women began publicly and privately savaging the hard-charging governor for perceived mothering missteps both great and small. (What kind of pregnant woman is reckless enough to travel twelve-plus hours from Texas to Alaska after her water breaks? What mom subjects her pregnant, unmarried 17-year-old to the scrutiny of a presidential race?! How dare she take her newborn to a campaign event without socks?!!) How, or whether one should even try, to balance career and family remains a raw subject for women in this country, and the centrality of Palin's motherhood to her candidacy guarantees that this corrosive debate will rage for the remainder of the election.
It would seem more productive to point out that those leveling those claims are engaging in sexist behavior, but of course that doesn't fit Cottle's desire to bash Sarah Palin.
Not that they have been models of restraint before.
Something is not right. We have a terrific candidate and a terrific VP candidate. We're coming off the worst eight years in our country's history. Six of those eight years the Congress, White House and even the Supreme Court were controlled by the Republicans and the last two years the R's have filibustered like tantrum throwing 4-year-olds, yet we're going to elect a Republican who voted with that leadership 90% of the time and a former sportscaster who wants to teach Adam and Eve as science? That's not odd as a difference of opinion, that's logically and mathematically queer.
Have there been a lot of filibusters? And the worst eight years in our country's history? I'd say 1861-1868 has to be a contender.
The McCain campaign's decision to keep Sarah Palin away from the slavering wolves of the media is... sexism!
Excitable Andrew leads off (no link):
The sexism that implies that someone cannot stand up to reporters because she is a woman is appalling. This entire pick, of course, is incredibly sexist, and the handling of her in the last week the most sexist double standard I have ever seen in American politics. Can you imagine Hillary Clinton saying she wasn’t going to answer questions for two weeks? Or Margaret Thatcher? Or Kay Bailey Hutchison? Or Elizabeth Dole? And none of these women were ever as close to global power as Sarah Palin now is. This is getting to Manchurian Candidate levels of creepiness. It’s deeply sinister and slightly terrifying.
Projection from the dolt who has been at the forefront of spreading the most ridiculous rumors about Sarah Palin.
Subtle and not-so-subtle sexism. All of which needs to be called out.
I have almost a zero-tolerance for sexism at any level and don’t agree with the opinion that we dilute the cause of calling it out if we point it out when we see it, any of it.
And has Zimon denounced the sexism of those who say Sarah Palin can't balance the demands of a family and the Vice Presidency?
Be sure to watch it to the end; he's not just talking the talk. Highly effective; I'd love to see the McCain campaign pick this up and run it as it is.
