Category Archives: 2008 Presidential

No change in 4 battleground states

Some of you have quite rightly cried "irrelevant!" when I have passed on national polls, seeing as how the POTUS is not chosen by a national popular vote. I have said I would pass on info on battleground states as I run across it. The WashPost today brings the following to my attention:

A new poll by Washington Post, Quinnipiac University and the Wall Street Journal shows that the presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama in four key battleground states remains remarkably stable despite a month of politically significant developments, with the Illinois senator running ahead of or even with his Republican rival.

In Colorado, Obama takes 49 percent to 45 percent for McCain while in Michigan Obama stands at 48 percent as compared to 44 percent for McCain. The contest in Minnesota, once considered a lock for Obama, is also quite close with Obama at 47 percent and McCain 45 percent. Only in Wisconsin does Obama have an edge — 49 percent to 42 percent — outside the statistical margin of error for the poll.

Those results are remarkably similar to data from July Quinnipiac polls in each of the four states and suggest that despite the massive media coverage surrounding the two parties’ national nominating conventions as well as the vice presidential selections — especially that of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, which many presumed would alter the campaign’s dynamic — little has changed in the race for the White House.

Here’s a link to the story in the Post. And here’s the Wall Street Journal version.

I have only two things to say about this:

So much for Sarahmania, which has boosted traffic on this blog significantly, but apparently has left voters in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin unmoved.
I’m pretty sure that this is the first time I’ve ever heard of Quinnipiac University.

What we need

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You’ll note that in my Sunday column, I said I found it somewhat reassuring that both John McCain and Barack Obama seemed humbled by the scope of the looming national crisis on Wall Street. It was sort of the point of the column (hence my headline, "Beware excessive certainty about Wall Street crisis").

But I also said, at the end:

At some point we’re going to need some FDR-like self-assurance
mixed with pragmatic solutions. And in this election that is suddenly
about the economy, it’s unclear which candidate will pass that part of
the audition.

That remains unclear. I mean, the only person on either ticket who has a cocky grin anywhere approaching that one is maybe Joe Biden.

And we need that kind of optimistic confidence in a leader at this time.

Beware excessive certainty about Wall Street crisis

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
We all have our ways of escaping when the world is too much with us. Some find that “reality” TV serves. Others have football. I’ve been rereading the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian.
In the one I’m on now, there is an enduring image that has stuck with me this week: a frail wooden ship, its sails reefed to the minimum, riding an enormous swell in the chilly latitudes far south of the Cape of Good Hope. Each wave is higher than the masts, and the crew scrambles from moment to moment to keep from being overwhelmed by wind and water.
Following the crisis on Wall Street has been like that, except that the ship’s crew could do something. Watching the unbelievably high waves of financial news breaking, I felt more like a passenger who doesn’t know port from starboard. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
In fact, I know I’m not. What I’ve read in recent days has caused me to beware anyone who sounds too glibly sure about how we got where we are, and what we should do next.
Early in the week, I was glib myself, on my blog. I complained mightily that my worst fears (first voiced in January) were being realized, that this would end up being an election about the economy. My whole career, I had considered a newspaper front page that led with economic news a dead giveaway that nothing interesting was happening in the world. But by the end of the week, the sheer scale of what was happening shut me up on that score.
The Wall Street Journal played the turmoil on its turf across six columns at the top of the front page, five days in a row. Rupert Murdoch or no Rupert Murdoch, that just doesn’t happen. And a smaller headline on one of those same pages proclaimed the “Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight.” A terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen got pushed to an inside page, and not even I scoffed at the editors’ judgment.
The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, usually a mortal enemy of hyperbole, wrote that “Wall Street as we know it is kaput.” I did not doubt him.
The fall of giants of high finance, from Lehman Brothers to Merrill Lynch to AIG, seemed less significant than the fundamental, systemic changes that happened in reaction — reinforcing the metaphor of a deep ocean swell as opposed to mere whitecaps. The Federal Reserve teamed up with other nations’ central banks to “improve the liquidity conditions in global financial markets.” The U.S. Treasury secretary and chief of the Fed huddled repeatedly with other major players — in not only New York, but London, other foreign capitals and right up the road in Charlotte — to reshape the U.S. financial system.
The phrase “on the fly” would appear in report after report, giving the impression of erstwhile Masters of the Universe scrambling like common sailors between the waves washing over the deck, desperately trying different combinations of sail and rudder.
Amid all this, some pundits would air their erudition regarding such affairs, but what certainty they were able to muster seemed to arise from their own political prejudices. On the facing page you see that Paul Krugman notes with satisfaction that “much of Washington appears to have decided that government isn’t the problem, it’s the solution.” Mr. Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton. But other smart people wrote the opposite. George Will grumbled about the rapid increase of “government entanglement with our less-and-less-private enterprise system,” and a member of the Journal’s editorial board flatly said, “Government largely created this mess.”
Ignorant as I am, I strongly suspect that the best way through this storm will thoroughly please neither supply-siders nor the acolytes of John Maynard Keynes.
So it is that, perhaps paradoxically, I was reassured to see just how uncertain the two candidates for president were in the face of this unexpected challenge.
They, too, started the week glib. As late as Tuesday, John McCain was blithely expressing his opposition to the AIG buyout, and Barack Obama was responding with the usual comfort that Democrats feel with pocketbook issues, pontificating that “John McCain cannot be trusted to re-establish proper oversight of our financial markets for one simple reason: He has shown time and again that he does not believe in it.”
But the next day, Sen. McCain more humbly acquiesced to the necessity of the bailout, saying “there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here.” On Friday, he tried to put his views in a coherent context with a speech to a Chamber of Commerce in Wisconsin, while Sen. Obama said his own more extended proposals would be forthcoming once he had met with his advisers later that day.
In this kind of environment, with each news cycle bearing down on us like a wave that seemingly could, in Bob Dylan’s words, drown the whole world, I find greater comfort in such humble confusion than in the positive tones of those who are too sure of their analyses.
As The New York Times noted, “The actions of both men captured how they were being forced to make policy proposals and pronouncements on the fly, from one campaign rally to another, as each day’s developments in the financial markets and in Washington were overtaken by new ones the following day.” The campaign had become an “audition for who could best handle a national economic emergency.”
At some point we’re going to need some FDR-like self-assurance mixed with pragmatic solutions. And in this election that is suddenly about the economy, it’s unclear which candidate will pass that part of the audition.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

What if it were Obama/Palin vs. McCain/Biden?

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Today I was reading Peggy Noonan’s column — she, by the way, sees the opposite of my rosy scenario happening, with the financial crisis making the presidential election meaner and more partisan — when an idea that has sort of half-occurred to me before came into full being.

Her column turned, in part — her pieces tend to meander, although elegantly — around the experience-vs.-change axis, to wit:

The overarching political question: In a time of heightened anxiety, will people inevitably lean toward the older congressional vet, the guy who’s been around forever? Why take a chance on the new, young man at a time of crisis? Wouldn’t that be akin to injecting an unstable element into an unstable environment? There’s a lot at stake.

Or will people have the opposite reaction? I’ve had it, the system has been allowed to corrode and collapse under seven years of Republican stewardship. Throw the bums out. We need change. Obama may not be experienced, but that may help him cut through. He’s not compromised.

The election, still close, still unknowable, may well hinge on whether people conclude A or B.

There was even a little cartoon illustration of a man poised indecisively at a voting machine choosing between those two options.

By the end of the column, I was thinking, what if the choice were that clear, and unmuddled by the running mates? What if New Kids Barack Obama and Sarah Palin were up against Wise Old Heads John McCain and Joe Biden? How simple and clear that choice would be.

Those on the right and left who want change, who distrust the Establishment, populists and libertarians, would have an uncomplicated choice for Obama/Palin — two fresh, energetic young faces rising up from among the people and sweeping the old aside.

Those of us who believe that experience is as valuable in government as in anything else, and who have come to trust and admire both McCain and Biden as individuals over the years — I would fall in that camp, by the way, as my respect for both is of long standing — would have just as easy a choice.

As things stand, the choice is more complicated. And the presidential candidates seem to have gone out of their way to make it so — Obama throwing away his advantage as a change agent in choosing Biden, McCain wasting the whole experience argument in picking Palin.

Why is Fritz so shy all of a sudden?

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Were you as intrigued as I by the fact that Fritz Hollings declined twice to endorse Barack Obama yesterday? Read about it here.

I could imagine Fritz preferring John McCain to Obama purely on the grounds of having served with him. And when you’ve got as much experience as Fritz, you tend to value the commodity.

But what I can’t quite get my head around is why he wouldn’t endorse a ticket that includes one of his best friends in the Senate, Joe Biden.

It’s a puzzler.

Our fiscal 9/11?

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Remember when Democrats and Republicans stood on the Capitol steps and sang "God Bless America?" For a moment there, the Washington crowd was stunned by the attacks of 9/11 into forgetting their stupid partisan differences and remembering they were Americans. I made a passing reference to that in a column last week.

This NYT story describes a moment last night when the shock and awe of the scope of this mounting financial crisis had a similar effect on members of Congress. It happened in a briefing Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson gave to congressional leaders:

“When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd,
Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban
Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good
Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re
literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial
system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

Mr. Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.”

When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as “somber,” Mr. Dodd cut in.
“Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words,” he said. “We have never
heard language like this.”

“What you heard last evening,” he
added, “is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience
here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together
quickly.”

What an amazing time for a spirit of bipartisan cooperation to emerge — if that indeed happens (and if it doesn’t, we’re sunk). Now, on the eve of this too-close-to-call presidential election, the one I worried so much about in another column.

I certainly hope that happens. But you know what? As weird as you may think the fact that 9/11 made me (however briefly) optimistic about the future, here’s something you might find harder to fathom: I don’t feel that way this time. With the terror attacks of 9/11, I had very clear ideas of what I thought should happen next (short version: fully engage the world), and it was my belief that those things would happen that prompted my optimism.

Now, I’m at a loss. I don’t know what it is I want the government to coalesce around. Maybe Bush and Paulson are taking the right steps, but I don’t know. To me, a financial mess of this magnitude is more perplexing than terrorist attacks. Not as immediately horrible, but less understandable. And that leaves me uneasy.

Also, the promise of bipartisanship seems shakier here. There is a history of partisans setting aside differences in response to an external threat. But many politicians cut their teeth demagoging economic issues, and happily drawing sharp ideological distinctions about them.

But I hope the potential described above is realized. As uncertain as I am about the way forward, I would feel much better if we’d drop the party games and face it together. That would help a great deal.

The twits who exposed Sarah Palin’s e-mail

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Well, you’ve got to love the irony here. Being busy putting out editorial pages, interviewing legislative candidates and reading about the Wall Street collapse and the energy bill in Congress when I had time to keep up with the news, I missed the stupid human trick of someone hacking into Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail. Someone mentioned it to me over lunch.

And here’s the schlag atop the dessert. The weasels who did this called themselves "Anonymous." Expose someone else’s correspondence and not have the guts to attach your own name to it? Wow.

There are, of course, people on the right trying to make it look like Obama’s folks did this. No way. Obama’s got too much class for that.

Curses: An election about the economy

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Well, my worst nightmare for this election year has been realized. I had thought that this was a no-lose year for me. I liked McCain and I liked Obama, so what could happen to mess things up?

But if you’ll recall, back in January I said that this was shaping up as a very good year, except for one thing — the possibility that we’d be talking about the economy.

I freaking HATE talking about the economy. My entire career, a newspaper front page that leads with an economic story has always been, to me, a signal that nothing interesting is happening in the world.

It’s not the economy per se. It’s money. It bores me to moaning, retching tears. Talking about it, or being forced to hear other people talking about it, is torture, torture of a sort I’d hope even W. would disapprove of. (I suspect some of y’all feel the same way — the post I reluctantly put up about it has drawn only seven comments so far — even though I tried to dress it up in Looney Tunes language.)

And now, this mess on Wall Street, whatever it’s all about, has BOTH candidates for president — guys I used to like — talking about it. So it looks like McCain HAS flip-flopped on torture…

How did this happen?

Do you want to be on a debate panel?

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Earlier today I got this internal global message from Leroy Chapman, who as the paper’s editor in charge of the political reporters does the job I once did (poor guy):

Colleagues,

The government team is assembling a panel of voters in our community to watch the presidential and vice presidential debates with us and, afterward, serve as a focus group on how the debaters fared during a roundtable discussion we’ll have here at the newspaper. We will feature this panel on thestate.com and include it in our debate coverage.

Know somebody who’s mad for McCain, crazy for Palin, in love with Obama and rooting for Biden? Know somebody who is undecided? Please, send them my way. Especially the undecideds.

We, of course, want diversity — men, women, young, old, political, apolitical, Democrat, Republican, independent, black, white, brown, etc. Keep that in mind as you think of folks who might be interested.

Anticipating a fun experience. Please let anyone who is interested know we would like for them to sit on the panel for all four debates.

Thanks for your help

So, how about it? Anybody want to apply to be on the panel? If so, you can reach Leroy at [email protected].

Don’t make me come out there and "volunteer" some of you Army-style…

Brooks on Palin as the New Bush

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Assertions by some Democrats of hysterical tendency that a McCain presidency would be like a third term of Him-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named are of course absurd, and even morally offensive.

But David Brooks — in a column that I did NOT pick for tomorrow’s op-ed page because Robert Samuelson has a piece on why Wall Street is falling apart, and that seemed most relevant — provides a reasonably erudite exploration that Sarah Palin would be like W. Redux.

I like it because of the way it takes apart the bogus egalitarianism of the term limits movement, and other impulses that militate against competent government, to wit:

This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin….
I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.
And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.
What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events _ the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

He acknowledges that "experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald)," but on the whole, having experience is better than not having it.

(And yes, the same can be said about Obama, but here he was talking about Palin, specifically within the context of the debate going on now within conservatism over whether experience matters. Worth reading.)

Obama vs. Sarahmania

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In the battle of the political celebs for headlines, Barack Obama edged out Sarah Palin for most coverage last week, according to the Pew Center, although the Alaska gov dominated and "drove the media’s election narrative" again, whatever that means:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama generated more exposure last week, but Republican VP hopeful Sarah Palin drove the media’s election narrative the week of Sept. 8-14, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Obama was a significant or dominant factor in 61% of campaign stories last week. Palin was a significant or dominant factor in 53%, edging out her running mate, John McCain (49%). Obama’s VP candidate, Joe Biden, registered only at 5%.
Although Palin trailed Obama in the amount of coverage, she was clearly the focus of the campaign narrative last week. Storylines involving Palin accounted for 50% of the newshole, and she was a major factor in the top four media election narratives of the week. Scrutiny of Palin’s public record (14% of the newshole) topped the press agenda. Her ABC interview with Charlie Gibson followed (10%). The “lipstick on a pig” comment (10%) and reaction to Palin’s nomination (9%) rounded out the biggest storylines for Sept. 8-14.

Do you get the sense that somebody at Pew just doesn’t want to let go of "Sarahmania," even when Obama’s stats are higher?

Of course, Sarah beat out the old guy who’s running with her. And poor Joe garnered 5 percent of coverage, which is sort of like his bid for the presidency all over again…

Philly columnist sees same problem I do

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Well, this is eerie. I’m going through the lastest columns to move on the wire, looking for something acceptable for the Tuesday op-ed page, and I run across this one from Kevin Ferris of The Philadelphia Inquirer, headlined "Don’t cry racism if Obama loses," which is weirdly like my Sunday column. An excerpt:

Last month, one of our two major political parties nominated an African American as its candidate for president of the United States.

Historic progress to be celebrated?

Apparently not. A few weeks and polls later, and some are already bemoaning the rampant racism that might keep a black man from ascending to the presidency.

Hey, Barack Obama could not have clinched the nomination without votes from white Americans. The other party isn’t supposed to just concede the election based on skin color. Voters shouldn’t have to choose based on race when they disagree on issues or believe a candidate isn’t up to the job.

But expect to see the bemoaners looking to the heavens and saying, "We’re not ready."

Baloney. Maybe it’s Obama who’s not ready and the people who recognize that – men and women, whites and blacks, Hispanics and Asians – are just fine.

So maybe I’m not totally crazy, huh? Or maybe this Ferris guy is.

In any case, I have never met or previously worked with Mr. Ferris, near as I can recall.

There’s life, and then there’s life

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Oh, boy, the animal lovers are out again, and that always spells trouble. Check this letter on the Monday page:

Hunting suggests Palin is not pro-life
The photo in your Monday issue of Sarah Palin and her daughter posing proudly with the caribou that Palin has just shot to death is graphic proof that Palin is not, as she claims and as she is often labeled, “pro-life.” “Anti-abortion” or “pro-human-fetus” maybe, but certainly not “pro-life.”

Sigh.

No, hunting is not proof that anyone is not "pro-life," in the sense that word is used in American politics — not unless the person in question is hunting humans.

A caribou is not the moral equivalent of a human being. The difference isn’t even quantitative; it’s qualitative.

Now if Sarah Palin favors capital punishment — and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she does — THAT would indicate a failure to be pro-life.

Do ya see the difference? Are ya following me here?

This is not to defend hunting, by the way. I’ve never been able to square it in my mind. Killing an animal to avoid starvation, fine. But for sport, no. That, however, is a qualitatively different thing from killing humans.

We have here a hierarchy of moral considerations:

The lightest consideration is that if you want to say one shouldn’t hunt from helicopters, fine — it’s not sporting.
At a higher moral level, one should not hunt for sport alone anyway.
On the highest, a caribou still does not have the moral claim on us that a human does. Not the same at all.

Worrying about what happens if Obama loses

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
THIS PAST week, I’ve been worrying a good deal over the very thing that
has had Republicans so giddy and Democrats in such dudgeon: the
distinct possibility that Barack Obama may lose this election.

At
this point, you reflexive Republicans need to remove your feet from the
stirrups of your high horses. I didn’t say I was worried that John
McCain might win. I like McCain. My worry arises from the fact that the
other guy I like might lose, which is a different consideration
altogether.

Back during the conventions, I was bewildered by
something Bill Moyers kept saying in a promo during station breaks on
PBS, something to the effect of the stakes never having been higher
than in this election. Really? I said on my blog. How about 1932? Or
1800…? Or how, pray tell, about 1860? Pretty doggoned high stakes
there, I’d venture to say.

Mike Cakora responded that Mr. Moyers
was “simply conveying the left’s notion that over the past eight years
the US has been governed, no, ruled by a war-mongering,
liberty-restricting criminal enterprise and now is the time to end
that… .”

For me, that brought to the fore a thing that had
until then dwelt at the back of my mind: that if Barack Obama loses
this election, Democrats — who have been very charged up about their
expectation of winning, and whose hatred of Republicans has reached new
depths in the past eight years, will be so bitter that — and I dread
even to form this thought — the political polarization will be even
worse in this country. MoveOn.org, to name but one segment of the
alliance, will probably implode to the point of nuclear fusion.

(Republicans,
by contrast, have been expecting to lose all year. This had calmed
them. As recently as 10 days ago, when I wrote that Moyers post, I
would have expected the GOP to accept defeat in November relatively
fatalistically. Of course, that was before Sarah Palin got them
excited. Now, if they lose, I expect the usual level of bitterness,
just not as severe as what I think is in store if Democrats lose.)

That’s
without taking race into consideration. But my attention was yanked in
that direction by a guest column by my old friend Joe Darby on Friday’s
op-ed page. An excerpt:

Those who criticized Sen. Obama for his
lack of experience, labeled him as long on rhetoric and charisma and
short on substance and said they can’t vote for him because they don’t
“know” him have gleefully embraced a governor who hasn’t completed her
first term…

When you strip away the hyperbole and the political
strategy, Sarah Palin has been hailed as an exemplary choice… simply
because she’s white and because white, middle America identifies with
her…

Somehow, Rev. Darby looked at the fact that Republicans
like an inexperienced conservative Republican, but don’t like an
inexperienced liberal Democrat, and saw it as racism. After more than
half a century living in this country, I should not be shocked at yet
another excruciating instance of the apparently unbridgeable cognitive
divide between black and white Americans. But I was shocked, and even
more worried.

I had already sensed a potent paradox flowing
through the black electorate: disbelief that a black man (if you
consider Obama to be a black man, which I don’t — another subject for
another day) has won a major party nomination, combined with an
expectation that he will now go all the way.

But that had not
prepared me for Rev. Darby seeing racism in the fact that Republicans
like Sarah Palin and not Barack Obama. To my white brain (and I don’t
think of myself as having a “white brain,” but my inability to follow
such logic as this suggests that I do), this made no kind of sense. I
invite you to go read the piece — the link, as usual, is on my blog —
and see if it makes sense to you.

I was still reeling from the implication of that piece when I read this in The Wall Street Journal Friday morning:

An
anxious murmur is rising among black voters as the presidential race
tightens: What if Barack Obama loses?… If Sen. Obama loses,
“African-Americans could be disappointed to the point of not engaging
in the process anymore,” or consider forming a third political party,
said Richard McIntire, communications director for the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

This is not a good place to be.

I
first met Joe Darby 15 years ago. The newspaper sponsored a black-white
dialogue group that was coordinated by a reporter I supervised. Joe was
one of the panelists, and I was struck by his patience and mildness of
manner in explaining his perspective to whites flustered over black
citizens’ sense of aggrievement.

I’m sure Joe would have been
just as patient with the white acquaintance — someone I’ve known for
many years, and who is no kind of racist — who approached me Friday
morning to say, “That Joe Darby is a racist.” I insisted that I knew
Joe Darby well, and he was not, but this reaction was just what I had
predicted to a colleague when I saw the proof the day before: The guest
column was the kind of thing that alienates white conservatives,
driving the wedge of race deeper into the nation’s heart. (So why run
it? Because I knew Rev. Darby and others sincerely believed what he was
saying, and a newspaper’s role is to put everyone’s political cards on
the table.)

Fifteen years after that black-white dialogue
experience — and many, many less formal such dialogues later — I find
myself close to despair that mutual understanding can be achieved.

Particularly if Barack Obama loses the election.

The cognitive divide between black and white, 2008 election edition

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For me, reading the piece by my old friend Joe Darby on today’s op-ed page was another excruciating instance of the apparently unbridgeable cognitive divide between black and white Americans. I always find it very troubling — in fact, I lack words for just how much it troubles me.

Somehow, Joe looked at the fact that Republicans LIKE an inexperienced conservative Republican, but DON’T like an inexperienced liberal Democrat, and saw it as racism. I realize that after my more than half a century of living in this country, I should not be shocked at such things, but I was. Shocked, and very worried.

Remember this post about Bill Moyers’ hyperbole about the stakes in this election. Something one of y’all said caused me to express my worry about what will happen if Barack Obama loses this election: Democrats, who have been VERY charged up about their expectation of winning, and whose hatred of Republicans has reached new depths in the past eight years, will be so bitter that — and I hate even to think this thought aloud — the political polarization will be even WORSE in this country. MoveOn.org, to name but one segment of that alliance, will probably implode to the point of nuclear fusion.

(Republicans, by contrast, have been expecting to lose all year. As recently as last week, when I wrote that earlier post, I would have expected the GOP to accept defeat in November relatively fatalistically. Of course, that was before Sarah Palin got them excited. Now, if they lose, I expect the usual level of bitterness, just not as severe as what I think we’re in store for if Democrats lose.)

And that was without considering race. If you add in the expectations of so many black voters this year, the potential for bitter disappointment is incalculable. This year I’ve noted a potent paradox in the attitude of many black voters: A disbelief that a black man (if you consider Obama to be a black man, which I don’t — another subject for another day) has won a major party nomination, combined incongruously with the notion that if he doesn’t also win the general election, it’s because of racism.

Even though I was aware of that, Joe’s piece was a shock, because it wasn’t just generalized excitement about Obama combined with being prepared to resent it if he loses. It was the logic, or lack thereof, that Joe employed in seeing racism specifically in the fact that Republicans like Sarah Palin and not Barack Obama.

No sooner had I read that on proofs yesterday and taken my worrying to a new level than The Wall Street Journal reported this morning:

An anxious murmur is rising among black voters as the presidential race tightens: What if Barack Obama loses?
Black talk-show hosts and black-themed Web sites are being flooded with callers and bloggers reflecting a nervousness — and anger — over the campaign. Bev Smith, a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host, devoted her entire three-hour show Monday night to the question: "If Obama doesn’t win, what will you think?"…
If Sen. Obama loses, "African-Americans could be disappointed to the point of not engaging in the process anymore," or consider forming a third political party, said Richard McIntire, communications director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

This is not a good place to be.

I first met Joe Darby about 15 years ago. The newspaper sponsored a black-white dialogue group that was coordinated by a reporter I supervised. Joe was one of the panelists, and I was struck by his patience and mildness of manner in explaining his perspective to whites flustered over black citizens’ sense of aggrievement.

I’m sure Joe would have been just as patient with the middle-aged white acquaintance — someone I’ve known for many years, and who I am quite sure is not a racist — who came up to me this morning and said, based on the op-ed piece, "That Joe Darby is a racist." I insisted that I knew Joe Darby well, and he was not, but this was exactly the reaction I had predicted to a colleague when I saw the proof the day before. I had said that what Joe had written was precisely the kind of thing that caused white conservatives to be profoundly alienated by the way many blacks express themselves politically.

Fifteen years after that black-white dialogue experience — and many, many less formal such dialogues later — I find myself close to despair that mutual understanding can be achieved.

Particularly if Barack Obama loses the election.

Carol Fowler: An uptick explained

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Before I left the office last night, I glanced at my stats page in Typepad and noticed something odd: I was getting a lot of hits from Google on a year-old post headlined "Carol Fowler and the Dark Side" (which, now that I look back at it, was an odd headline for the subject).

Later that night, I realized why — the quote from Ms. Fowler on Politico. Sheesh. What a bunch of nothing — my post last year was more interesting.

Folks, compared to the usual overheated rhetoric from Democrats of a certain persuasion about those of Fowlercarol
us who oppose abortion, this was nothing. When I heard the quote on TV (my wife watches TV news, even local "if it bleeds it leads" TV news, usually when I’m not in the room; but there I was trapped in my recliner holding a grandbaby and begging somebody to pop in a DVD — I ended up staying up way too late to rewatch "The Graduate"), I thought sure it would be something provocative. When I heard, "Choosing someone whose primary qualification seems to be that she has…," I thought the next thing would be a reference to some distinguishing feature of female anatomy. But when I then heard, "…n’t had an abortion," I could not freaking believe that someone was making an issue of it.

Come on, folks — at least what Don said was offensive, and I was fairly dismissive of that meaning anything, either. As any rational person who knows the way human beings talk with friends would be.

Anyway, that explains the uptick in interest over Carol Fowler. Again, sheesh.

And again, I will urge the partisans: Get over it. Democrats, quit your whining about "Swiftboating," which, I’m sorry to tell you, is not a real word, much less something for you to keep wetting your pants about, expecting the GOP to do it to you at any minute. That "quit picking on me" pose doesn’t work on anybody but your whiniest base. (And Barack, dismissing the GOPpers for acting hurt about "lipstick," then whining yourself about "Swiftboating" is about as petty as I’ve heard you get.)

And Repubicans, get over your crying about the lipstick and the Fowler remark and the mean media and the pregnant daughter and the rest.

And then let’s try to have a grownup election, OK?

And for you Democrats…

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Yes, I know that before Sarahmania there was Obamania, and for those of you who still fondly remember those days before the Alaskan Invasion (the way some clung bitterly to Elvis after the Beatles came along — which I guess would make McCainiacs like Sinatra devotees), here’s a picture to warm your hearts.

It’s not as visually interesting or evocative as some of the other pics I’ve shared, such as the T-shirt guy, but it’s a nice photo, with a nice composition — or at least, well cropped. You’ll notice it also has a little of that halo thing going on. I had saved it when I saw it after the acceptance speech for use later, and since I sensed Dems getting antsy over the last couple of posts, I share it now.

Enjoy.

Sarahmania

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Continuing on the subject of interesting pics, and shamelessly willing to post whatever it takes to drive traffic (within limits), here’s one I just ran across that encapsulates Sarahmania more than any other I’ve seen. It’s from the same rally as the shot in the previous post, by the way.

Perhaps irrelevantly, doesn’t her smile in this one look a little like that of the nice, attractive girl whose Mom made her go out with the geeky guy, and he’s having an AWESOME time, and she’s gamely trying to see it through, all the while thinking, "Can I plead a headache yet? Would he believe me if I said my father wanted me home by 7:30?"

Speaking of Sarah, I think the coolest shot of her since she came on the scene is the one below that I put on the Monday letters page. It’s emblematic of someone young and new and fresh being sprung on the world. She looks kind of like a smart kid in a spelling bee, standing on the stage, hands at her sides, waiting for the next word with no fear, no fear at all. Botticelli put Venus on the half-shell; a Republican artist would present Sarah Palin to the world this way.

Palinstand

Art for art’s sake, GOP edition

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Remember when I shared the photo of the Obama supporter with the T-shirt outside the stadium, just because I liked the picture?

Well, here is its perfect Republican complement. Beyond the fact that I like the picture, there is something about it that invokes the essence of support for the McCain-Palin ticket in the same way that the hip, youthful, stylized image of the Obama supporter did that ticket.

Do you agree?

Anyway, I actually managed to get this one into the paper — a black-and-white version of it, anyway. It will be on tomorrow’s op-ed page, with a Kathleen Parker column that it didn’t exactly go with, but sort of did.

DeMint sticks up for Sarah Palin

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If you’re a Republican looking for cred on Iraq, then you want Lindsey Graham to stand up and tell everybody you were for the "surge" when nobody else was — as Lindsey did for best buddy John McCain last week.

But if you’re looking to bolster your rep as a fiscal hawk, then you want South Carolina’s junior senator.

Jim DeMint has made a name for himself nationally as the scourge of earmarks. So it is that Sarah Palin’s got to be grateful for his op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal this morning, headlined "Yes, Palin Did Stop That Bridge." An excerpt:

In politics, words are cheap. What really counts are actions. Democrats and Republicans have talked about fiscal responsibility for years. In reality, both parties have a shameful record of wasting hundreds of billions of tax dollars on pork-barrel projects.

My Senate colleague Barack Obama is now attacking Gov. Sarah Palin over earmarks. Having worked with both John McCain and Mr. Obama on earmarks, and as a recovering earmarker myself, I can tell you that Mrs. Palin’s leadership and record of reform stands well above that of Mr. Obama.

bradwarthen.com

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