Nation-Building

During the election, the McCain campaign slogan was "Country First". This was seized upon with glee by GOP partisans as a rebuke against Obama, who (it was implied) put himself first instead of his country. Now, however, in losing the election, these same fair-weather patriots would prefer that McCain put Party above Country - clearly their concept of Country was a subset - the so-called " Real America " - that shared their political views and agenda. John McCain's principles and patriotism have now become a point of contention instead of pride for these small-minded partisan fools. Case in point - RedState has already told McCain to go " suck a lemon ". A more official rebuke comes from Rick Santorum, former GOP Senator for PA, who frets that John McCain might seek to re-burnish his credentials as a maverick by working amicably with president Obama: McCain was once the mainstream media darling, back when he joined Democrats on a host of issues. H...

Happy election day! (Some crazy towns in New Hampshire started voting at midnight). Courtesy of Nate Silver's simulations, here's how McCain might win . The most plausible (but still improbable) scenario: Obama takes all the Gore and Kerry states, and McCain takes everything else. Everything else in this case includes states like Colorado (9 EV), where Obama's lead is the widest it's ever been and early voting favors Obama heavily. In other words: not gonna happen. Also, Virginia (13 EV) is looking very, very good for Obama, too. However, continuing the scenario, if McCain can pick up Pennsylvania (21 EV), then he can compensate for VA and CO and win the election. This is probably Obama's worst-case, leaving him at 265, just shy of victory. However, despite McCain's late surge and heavy focus on PA, Obama still has a healthy lead . In fact, I think Obama will take PA, in part because of early voting, heavy turnout ( weather in PA today is high 40s - low 50s ...

John McCain's campaign is increasingly incoherent. First, McCain claimed credit for the success of the bailout plan this morning, well before the actual vote: Shortly before the vote, McCain had bragged about his involvement and mocked Sen. Barack Obama for staying on the sidelines. “I've never been afraid of stepping in to solve problems for the American people, and I'm not going to stop now,” McCain told a rally in Columbus, Ohio. Of course, the bailout plan failed in Congress - but it should be noted that more than twice as many Democrats voted for the plan as Republicans (140 and 65, respectively). McCain's reaction? To blame Barack Obama : “This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country,” said a statement from Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s top economic adviser, who had represented McCain on Capitol Hill over the several days. McCain suspended his campaign Thursday morning to return to Washington to try and get a deal done. So...

Over at City of Brass, I offer my take on the first presidential debate . In a nutshell, the debate was really solely for the benefit of the undecided, low-information voter which both candidates are trying to woo. And I firmly believe that these voters are fully rational in their thought process - but if fed garbage, the end product of that rational thought process will also be garbage. McCain's strategy is to feed them garbage, and Obama's defense needs to be to factoidify his responses so that there is a better chance of his basic message making it through McCain's wall of FUD. I explain all this in more detail so go take a look! I even have a bonus picture of Vice Presidential Nominee Tina Fey in there.

A batch of polls over the weekend show that McCain has gained serious ground: USAToday / Gallup 9/5-7/08 McCain 54, Obama 44) (8/23: Obama 48, McCain 45) Zogby Interactive 9/5-6/08 McCain 50, Obama 46 (8/30: McCain 47, Obama 45) Gallup Poll 9/4-6/08 McCain 48, Obama 45 Rasmussen Reports 9/4-6/08 McCain 48, Obama 48 The latter two are daily tracking polls, so you can get a very good sense of the trend and response to various events. All of these polls use "likely voter" models, ie an estimate to try and weight the results using demographics rather than just a straight sampling. Also, national polls of ths sort do not capture the electoral college math - the same kind of thing that lets a candidate win the electoral vote even if they lose the popular vote. The million-voter question remains: is this due to Palin? It's unlikely - Palin just doesn't appeal to independents and Hillary voters : When we ask the ultimate question--how does each candidate's VP pick affect...

The McCain campaign has something to hide - and its name is Sarah Palin : In fact the McCain campaign is audaciously spinning this as perfectly normal, as if press access to an unknown vice presidential candidate is utterly unreasonable. Campaign official Nicole Wallace literally laughed at the suggestion - see for yourself: WALLACE: But I mean like from who? From you? Who cares?! CARNEY: Who cares? I think the American people care. WALLACE: I think the American people want to see her -- I mean who cares if she can talk to Time Magazine? She talked to the American people. As Booman Tribune notes , The McCain campaign is literally going to try to sell Sarah Palin as a credible president without letting the press talk to her. For example, this Sunday, Barack Obama will appear on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, John McCain with be on Face the Nation, and Joe Biden will be on Meet the Press. Sarah Palin will be reading briefing papers in Alaska. The Nation observes, ...

Over at the new Beliefnet-hosted City of Brass , I take a look at Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign's strategy,and conclude that her speech represents a wasted opportunity to appeal to the middle .

The left is not used to winning. This is probably why we as a whole are particularly susceptible to concern trolling from right-wing punditry. The latest such to make the rounds is that Obama should be destroying McCain , and instead isn't leading by the margin you'd expect were the hype about the " Obamessiah " to be grounded in reality. Of course, were McCain not weak, his campaign strategists would not be trying to base an argument on how strong Obama is. In 2004, the Bush campaign attacked Kerry directly and via surrogates, and had strict message discipline about Bush's own inevitability (a similar confident stance by Obama today is characterized as "arrogant" by the right-wing today). In contrast, Kerry attempted to concern troll Bush by asking (more legitimately than McCain does now) why Bush's lead, as an incumbent wartime president, was not significant 1 . In fact, McCain's entire strategy hinges on tearing Obama down - and his camp...

Flip Flops on the River Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs Daily Kos diarist DaveFromQueens has compiled a list of 50 flip flops of John McCain , on the topics: Privatizing Social Security, Iraq Troop Withdrawal, Tax Cuts, Judges, Torture, Negotiating With Hamas, Bush Third Term, Agents Of Intolerance, 527s, Gramm's Whiner Comments, Economic Expertise, Illegal Wiretapping, Habeas Corpus, Everglades Restoration, Gay Couple Legal Contracts, GI Bill, Military Service Exploitation, Roe v. Wade, States Rights On Abortion, ANWR, Offshore Drilling, Role of States in Drilling, MLK Holiday, Windfall Profits Tax, Filibustering of Judges, Confederate Flag, Civil Unions, Constitutional Ban On Gay Marriage, Yucca Mountain, Undue Lobbyist Influence, Abortion Exceptions, Defense Cuts, Waterboarding Mandatory Caps, Citizenship for Immigrants, Flying the Confederate Flag, Bush Tax Policies, South African Divestment, Alternative Minimum Tax, Estate Tax Repeal, NOrth Korea Negotiations, Iraq + S...

By all accounts , the symbolism of Obama declaring victory in the nomination - at the same convention center in Minneapolis where the GOP will hold their convention in the fall - utterly swamped and rendered pitiful the simultaneous speech by John McCain. Even conservative pundits were forced to grudgingly admit that McCain was outmatched, and even petty. DailyKos has a compilation but of these, the one that stood out the most was by Amy Holmes at National Review (emphasis mine); McCain's speech was creaky, ungracious, and unnecessary. I never understand why politicians don't take the opportunity, when so easily presented, to simply be gracious and hold their fire. Watching McCain, I couldn't help but think of the astonishing contrast Barack's triumphant speech to a massive and adoring crowd will be. It was not a comparison McCain should have invited. It would have been more statesmanlike ‹ precisely the profile McCain is attempting to craft ‹ to acknowledge this hist...

In response to a paper in Nature that argues that global warming may be entering a lull, the RealClimate blog is extending a friendly wager offer to the authors of the paper, and inviting them to guest post on the blog. I hope the authors (Keenlyside et al.) take RC up on this, as it's a great idea and very much in the spirit of open scientific debate. As the RC folks put it , Framing this in the form of a bet also helps to clarify what exactly was forecast and what data would falsify this forecast. This was not entirely clear to us just from the paper and it took us some correspondence with the authors to find out. It also allows the authors to say: wait, this is not how we meant the forecast, but we would bet on a modified forecast as follows… By the way, we are happy to negotiate what to bet about - we're not doing this to make money. We'd be happy to bet about, say, a donation to a project to preserve the rain forest, or retiring a hundred tons of CO2 from the European...

... if we can indeed have an occupation in which no American troops are "injured or harmed or wounded or killed". RedState is rather freaked out about the McCain/100 years meme , claiming that Obama, the media, the Democrats, the Easter Bunny, etc are all conspiring together and this misrepresentation of John McCain is proof of a "national security distortion field" around Obama et al. They insist that the full quote from McCain somehow provides exculpatory context: "We've been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for 50 years, that'd be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed . That's fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training and recruiting and equipping people." (extra-special emphasis theirs, not mine.) However, the critique against McCain is not that he wants 100 years of warfare....

as I have been arguing repeatedly, no Democratic President will leave Iraq . This is just further evidence . A key adviser to Senator Obama's campaign is recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. The paper, obtained by The New York Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for the center-left Center for a New American Security. In "Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement," Mr. Kahl writes that through negotiations with the Iraqi government "the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground)." and, frankly, I think "conditional engagement" is valid and that a total withdrawal of ...

No one should mistake Daniel Larison for a fan of Barack Obama. However, Larison is an authentic conservative voice who expresses his opinion independently of party affiliations. His defense of Obama (and critique of McCain) is thus notable and appreciated: ne of the best things that can be said about Obama is that he seems to understand that loyalty entails keeping faith with friends and colleagues after it has become politically dangerous to do so. A lot of people give his church grief for preaching against an aspirational “middle-classness,” and I understand the objections to this view, but at its core this view entails a call to solidarity with your community and a willingness to remain loyal to that community even though better opportunities may beckon beyond the horizon. Obama really shouldn’t have to answer for what Wright says, but I also think that his loyalty to Wright should not be an occasion for bashing the man. There are plenty of things in his record, or the lack the...

I've been arguing that McCain is probably going to pick Fred Thompson as his running mate, mainly because I've bought into the conventional wisdom that he needs to pick a conservative to solidify the base and encourage turnout. However there is an alternate theory out there that no matter what McCain does, he will never placate the core conservatives. So, the argument goes, McCain will pick a liberal veep to try and compete for the independents against Obama: Barack Obama has become his party's front-runner because he has expanded the Democratic Party. His big rallies draw crowds of nearly 20,000, unheard of for a primary campaign. In 2004, President Bush beat John Kerry by expanding the GOP base in conservative areas. This is a strategy that simply won't work for McCain because there is a certain bloc of core, loyal and principled conservatives who will never vote for him no matter what he says now, who he picks to run with, or who the Democratic nominee might be. Th...

Having spent 9 years in Texas, I am unused to the idea that my vote will actually count for much. But now that I live in Wisconsin, which votes next Tuesday, it seems that my vote has real power - practically every candidate running for President is here this week: With less than a week to go before Wisconsin's primary on Tuesday, candidates from both parties were on the ground Wednesday. The Republican field made its first stop in Wisconsin, with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee asking a crowd in Waukesha to help boost his bid for the presidency and saying he would maintain the party's core principles in a way front-runner John McCain, a U.S. senator from Arizona, could not. For his part, McCain will campaign in Wisconsin on Friday. Meanwhile, Democratic U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois visited Janesville, Waukesha and Racine, talking about inequality in the global economy and his plan to address it. In Racine, Obama's campaign pumped some dollars into the local econo...

not exactly a surprise: Fred Thompson, the one-time Republican presidential candidate, endorsed Sen. John McCain Friday, calling on the party to "close ranks" behind the presumed nominee. "This is no longer about past preferences or differences. It is about what is best for our country and for me that means that Republican should close ranks behind John McCain," Thompson said in a statement reported by the Associated Press. I dont know if FDT is angling for veep or not (though it's hard to see his limp and brief candidacy as anything other than a vanity run). But the advantages he'd bring to McCain are undeniable - including the South: The endorsement now may help McCain to coalesce the factions of the party around him. Thompson, who represented Tennessee in the Senate for eight years, is thought of well in the South, an area that McCain has not done well in. Paradoxically, declaring Thompson the VP might help McCain in the general with his base rather than ...

After Huckabee's rout of McCain yesterday, the GOP delegate totals are: (1,191 needed to win) McCain : 714 Romney : 286 Huckabee : 217 Clearly, the social-conservative base is rebelling against the coronation of McCain as the nominee. Josh Trevino argues that these results are more indicative of the general election outcome than the primary: what we see this evening is only partly a preview of a Huckabee surge from conservatives. That surge is yet to fully materialize; it has long odds against it due to the establishment’s scorched-earth campaign against Huckabee of one month past; and even if it comes to pass, it is unlikely to deny McCain the nomination. This evening’s results are a preview of something else: the root of a McCain defeat in November. In other words, for Huckabee to prevail over McCain, he'd still have to succeed in improbable math . However, others speculate what would happen if Romney threw his support to Huck instead: If Romney were to join forces with Huc...

Only one conclusion can be drawn from Super Tuesday, as far as the Democratic nomination goes: it was super-inconclusive. Obama and Hillary did not win decisively, but rather are now in a true horserace. Clinton's strategy was to go for the big prizes like California and Texas, whereas Obama's was more to aim for the smaller caucuses and primaries, competing everywhere. The parallel to the dispute between party establishment Clintonites like Rahm Emanuel and DNC Chairman Howard Dean over the 50-state strategy is not accidental. There's a deep rift inside the Democratic Party and Clinton stands firmly on one side, Obama (and Dean, and Al Gore) on the other. In fact the nomination process itself is a proxy battle for this civil war; consider the factors that will determine the outcome: a distributed small-donor base versus big-name backers and bundling a "compete everywhere" strategy vs. a "maximized return" strategy the brewing battle over the delegates f...

The Obama-Clinton horserace on the left seems headed towards fabled " brokered convention" status which has long been the holy grail of preesidential punditry (though in practice, is hardly worth cheering for its anti-democratic nature ). But in many ways the dynamic on the right is more important, since the very future of the Republican Party itself is at stake. The main issue is whether "conservatives" are truly a movement or just another faction within the GOP coalition. Prior to Romney's dropping out of the race, the view among the party elite was that McCain's ascendancy represented raw political expediency over genuinely conservative ideals - witness this roundtable between contributors at RedState.com where despite a few voices to the contrary, the mainstream answers affirmatively he question, " did the primary process fail conservatives? ". However, Josh Trevino's comments after Romney's withdrawal strikes rather deeply at the p...