A few weeks ago, Michele Bachmann (R MN 6th) appeared on KSTP's Sunday morning political gab-fest with Tom Hauser. Arizona it seems, is on the fast-track to being the "Alabama of 1963" with their new found racist laws against illegal immigrants coming in from Mexico. (Apparently, illegal immigration from Canadians are still allowed. Or perhaps, so not as those Canadians aren't as "browned-skinned" as Mexican people are.) During that interview, Hauser asked Congresswoman Bachmann on her views about the new Arizona laws. And it was her reply that surprised me.
Lest I paraphrase, because I can't find ANY video or transcript out there that recorded the piece:
"You know Tom, for about a million dollars per mile, we could build a fence and stop all of this illegal immigration going on down there."
I'll be the first to admit, I think that David Brooks deserves a special spot in the @$$clowns of Journalism Hall of Shame. The man has been so wrong on so many issues for so long ... Iraq, the economy, elections. I'm always stunned that somebody continues to pay this myopic oaf.
Anyhoo ...
I was prepared to get myself all worked up into high dudgeon when I saw that he'd written a piece on Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) on Politablog. But ... as strange and as philosophically painful as this may seem ... I ackchoo ... I accrue ... I .. gasp ... agree ... gasp ... with David Brooks (there ... I said it) on this particular subject.
Franken has been in office for almost a year now and it has become clear over the past month that he has become a vocal and qualified leader and will continue to be for many more years. Everything started with the Joe Lieberman (Lie-berman) incident.
Thie Lie-berman Incident is when Al wouldn't allow Joe an extra 30 seconds or so when Harry Reid had given him the gavel and the instruction that "nobody" goes over their time today.
Brooks goes on to bring up the incident that Politico hyperventilated over last week in which Al expressed his concern over the White House's leadership of healthcare reform. But Brooks frames it in terms of Al being one of the few Democrats in the Senate with any cajones.
Then he seems shocked that Al has proposed actual legislation that would do some good. This time it's Al's bill to prevent cadmium in children's jewelry. The only thing Brooks fails to take into account is this isn't the only bill Al has proposed.
Apparently there are two David Brooks in the world. Funny that I would agree with the one that isn't the clueless, lying, egomaniacal blowhard. So I guess I still retain my low opinion of the NYT Brooks.
But, go get'em MN Brooks. There are a whole lot of good Brooks from MN ... like the late Herb ...
As far as public statements are concerned, Al Franken's on-tape shutdown of Joe Lieberman's bloviation was simply a matter of keeping to a tight schedule. Fair'nuff. Of course, it led their colleague (and 2008 Republican presidential candidate) John McCain to remark that in 20 years in the Senate, he'd never seen anything like that.
An analysis of the 2008 election results reveals a stark truth for Republican candidates looking for Obama states to flip in 2012: Minnesota won't be one of them, even if Tim Pawlenty is the Republican nominee.
Other news from the analysis: corn fields don't vote.
I took the county-by-county results and sorted them by size -- that is, the counties that produced the highest vote totals at the top, and those with the lowest totals at the bottom. Hennepin, Ramsey, Dakota, and Anoka county came out at the top, and way down at the bottom were Lake of the Woods, Red Lake, and Traverse counties.
I then produced what I'm calling "10-County-iles" -- groups of 10 counties each along the axis of this ranking, and calculated how many votes of the 2.9 million cast came from each "C-ile". The results are intuitive: the top C-ile, containing the aforementioned four counties plus Washington, St. Louis, Stearns, Olmstead, Scott, and Wright counties, produced a staggering 65% of the statewide vote -- and in those areas, President Obama beat John McCain with 57.5% of the vote.
That is what we can safely call an insurmountable advantage.
In the other 35% of the electorate, Obama held his own, getting between 45% and 50% in all remaining C-iles. For John McCain to have beaten Obama's advantage in the most populous counties, he would have had to won in all other areas with more than 63% of the vote -- which is darned near impossible.
Normally one would have expected the economic news of the economy to have been the big driver of vote changes in the last presidential election findings. Surprise, some opinions based on recent studies say it was not.
It is clear from the daily tracking in the National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES) that the crisis made the economy far and away the most important and troubling issue for voters. But the effect of national economic perceptions on voters' evaluations of candidates and vote intentions actually shrank after September 15. The election seemed to draw attention away from economic troubles rather than toward them. The NAES also confirms, as Gelman and Sides note, that the Democratic share of vote intentions turned up before the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Now to be fair, the economic news could have been a vote changer except the news about Palin was changing people's mind first. So the economic news may have just solidified people's opinions.
Throughout the rest of the campaign, vote intentions were closely tied to Palin's approval ratings: each major Palin approval drop was followed, within a day or two, by a drop in McCain vote intention. No other factor moved McCain support with such precision. Comparison of the correlation between running mate approval ratings and vote intentions from 2000 and 2004 confirms Palin's peculiar importance in 2008.
It now appears that Republican presidential nominee John McCain has spent his sputtering campaign's last few coppers on a flood of robo-calls looking to smear his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, in several states -- Minnesota included.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has condemned the move -- one has to wonder if Minnesota's Norm Coleman, currently struggling against Democratic opponent Al Franken, will do the same. We have to imagine he won't: the Franken campaign noted in a press release today that Coleman's latest ad directly contradicts his own stated position on congressional pay increases.
While we're on the topic, will Erik Paulsen denounce the glossy mailer sent by the Republican Party of Minnesota this week to households across the Third district making truly truthy claims against Democratic nominee Ashwin Madia? I doubt it.
Will Bachmann apologize for lying about El Tinklenberg's positions immediately after he states them in a public debate?
Folks, this is the mark of a desperate set of political figures. McCain, Coleman, Paulsen, Bachmann -- all are either endangered (Bachmann is up by 4) or down in the polls by significant margins. The Republican Party is headed for massive losses up and down the ballot, and these figures are looking more and more desperate as we get closer to Election Day.
Minnesota and America will be better off for it when they lose and Barack Obama, Al Franken, Ashwin Madia, and (I hope, at least) El Tinklenberg) head to Washington to clean up the mess caused by too much deregulation, too many tilted-toward-the-super-rich tax cuts, too much Republican stewardship of the federal government.
Unfortunately, while we're at it, we have to deal with ridiculous smears and those who benefit from Republicans' work in Washington throwing as much money and mud as they can at the Democrats running against their friends. If they can't win, they're doing their best to give themselves a reason to challenge the legitimacy of Democratic victories.
Enough. Three Wednesdays from now, we'll be able to leave that behind us and get down to the business of fixing America and the world. Just ignore the robocalls, ignore the smears, hit the road, knock on doors, get out the vote, and do your part to make sure we don't just win, we win by a couple of touchdowns.
Here's some post-debate commentary from around the media -- it sounds like the insta-polls, focus groups, and most every expert observer has found Barack Obama to be a triple-winner in the 2008 debates. Let us know what you think in the comments, both of the debate and the comments from the media figures below.
The Hill's Sam Youngman: McCain's best likely not good enough: Sen. McCain (Ariz.), his back up against the wall as Democratic rival Barack Obama has started to pull away in the polls, demonstrated a new fire at the duo's last debate. But the Arizona senator's flurry of attacks and the Democrat's calm, measured responses will likely do little to change the campaign trajectory.
National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru: I Don't See It: A couple folks here have been saying that McCain is doing better than in the previous two debates. I wish it were true, but I just don't see it. I think a few times McCain has come across as spluttering.
CNN's David Gergen: "It then hit the personal animosity of the advertising and then I thought McCain swerved off track...He got overemotional about it. He looked angry. And it was almost an exercise in anger management up there for him to contain himself. And Obama maintained his cool, and I thought that changed the tone of the debate and Obama won the last half hour. I thought Obama really did well on education, abortion and health care."
TIME's Jim Poniewozik: Women Don't Like It: Dial group report 2: Um, Sen. McCain, women don't like it when you put "health of the mother" in air quotes.
ABC News' Teddy Davis: McCain was wrong to state that small businessman "Joe the Plumber" would end up paying a fine if he refused to provide his workers with health insurance under Barack Obama's health-care plan. Under the Obama plan, small businesses are exempted from a requirement imposed on large companies that they contribute to a national health fund if they fail to make "a meaningful contribution" to their employees' health care costs.
Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall: A lot of the time, when Obama's talking and they have the split screen, McCain looks like he's about to explode. Not always, and I'm not trying to be hyperbolic. But he frequently looks like he's about to snap. Not going nuts, but like he's seething and just holding it in. Are other people seeing the same thing?
Using John McCain's .... interesting, shall we say? .... event last week in Lakeville as a backdrop, 2nd district DFL congressional candidate Steve Sarvi is calling attention to Republican smear attacks and using them to raise a bit of money:
Dear friend:
How would you caption this photo?
It's from last Friday at one of the most bizarre campaign events yet. Friday, the 2nd District played host to a rally in support of the Republican ticket. As John Kline looked on, Sen. John McCain was forced to take the microphone from a supporter who claimed she couldn't support Barack Obama because of his race - the wrong race.
Candidates should run on their records, not false personal attacks against their opponents. So much misinformation has been spread about Democratic candidates this year, it's shameful.
And I'm next.
On Monday, John Kline is launching his first television ads. While my campaign will continue to keep the focus on what John Kline has and hasn't done in Congress, we can expect John Kline to be John Kline. In 2006, he tried to convince voters his opponent wanted to legalize methamphetamine. In 2004, Mr. Kline took his opponent to task for - get this: supporting him two years earlier. The aim is to distract from the real issues facing us - because when you can't run on your record, that's what you have to do.
We in the blogosphere have raised a bit of money for Sarvi in the past couple of months, but it's urgently needed now to make sure he has the best chance possible to knock off one of the most reactionary, backwards Republicans in Congress.
Just in case you missed it, here's a video of that event. Although I'm quite sure Kline wouldn't take a question from me or any of my blogger colleagues, it might be interesting to see whether he agrees with his constituent who made those ridiculous, false, and ethnically biased claims or with John McCain who, realizing the kind of violent racism he and his running mate were letting out into the open, tried to walk back these sentiments on Friday -- and got booed by his own base for it.
Health Care for America Now! is hitting the airwaves with ads focused on Republican officials and candidates on health care -- and Third district Republican candidate Erik Paulsen is on the list.
Have a look:
Similar ads are running against vulnerable Republicans in districts across the country, as well as against John McCain in the presidential race. From HCAN's press release:
"With less than thirty days to go before Election Day, it is urgent that voters know where the candidates stand on health care," said Richard Kirsch, National Campaign Manager, Health Care for America Now. "For families struggling to make ends meet, the high cost of health care has been a leading economic indicator. Now is the time to convince every candidate and member of Congress to stand on the side of quality, affordable health care for all and not on the side of handing over more control to the private health insurance companies. Our goal is to get the next President and a majority of Congress committed to the principles of quality, affordable health care for all in 2009."
It is worth noting that while the organization is non-partisan and does not mention which party they support, all their targets are Republicans. That being said, in today's political order, it's those same Republicans who generally serve as roadblocks to universal health coverage and come up with ridiculous ideas like John McCain's proposal to tax health care benefits, so perhaps that's a case of correlation and causation not being quite the same thing.
In an age where debate questions, answers, formats, and other features are parsed down to the letter, resulting in a discernable element of kabuki theater, CNN's focus group made for an interesting viewing experience. Along the bottom of the screen during the debate, CNN displayed the warmth meter -- an average of the dials held by a group of undecided Ohio voters, with warm on one side and cold on the other.
By that measure, Barack Obama had several moments last night that bested his opponent in terms of strength and duration, especially when he was able to get moving with his rhetoric comparing the federal government to a family trying to live on a budget. The gender differences were interesting as well -- women responded warmly to John McCain's rhetoric on national security, but also to Obama's talk on fixing the economy, while both men and women seemed to respond favorably to Obama on energy issues.
Really interesting stuff. Among that focus group, 10 members said immediately following the debate they thought McCain won, while 12 said Obama won, and 3 didn't know. That means a win for Obama -- McCain spent more time -- a LOT more time -- last night talking about Barack Obama and his proposals rather than what John McCain would do; his efforts to produce a game-changing performance were unsuccessful.
What a change for the worse John McCain has made in just eight short years, when it takes so little time to find examples of him flip-flopping in substantive ways on something as simple as campaign attack ads.
An eagle-eyed reader who also happens to have Dish Network noticed something curious -- Barack Obama appears to be running a 24x7 paid advertisement on its own channel.
Does John McCain have his own TV channel devoted to his own campaign? Trick question, if John McCain had his own channel, it too would be devoted to Barack Obama. Much like everything else the McCain campaign is doing right now.
Speaking of McCain, if he did a Google as he did during his Veep search, he would find that the Obama channel was noticed around the beginning of this month, and is an interesting development in the late stages of this race.
