September 08, 2008
— Ace The PDF. (Lifted off Real Clear Politics.) Ninja'd! Even as I was writing this, the WaPo sent me the link to their web article. Probably easier to click on that, but my quotes are from the PDF.
Another huge shift (or, actually, the huge shift driving most of that headlined huge shift): Age-Old Racial Fears Stirred as McCain/Palin Begins Stealing Everyone's White Women Away.
John McCain’s taken the better boost from the presidential nominating onventions, eroding Barack Obama’s advantage on change, improving on enthusiasm, moving away from George W. Bush – and advancing among white women with help from his surprise vice presidential pick.Some of McCain’s biggest gains in this ABC News/Washington Post poll are among white women, a group to which “hockey mom” Sarah Palin has notable appeal: Sixty seven percent view her favorably and 58 percent say her selection makes them more confident in McCain’s decision-making. Among those with children, Palin does better yet. And enthusiasm for McCain among his female supporters has soared.
White women have moved from 50-42 percent in ObamaÂ’s favor before the conventions to 53-41 percent for McCain now, a 20-point shift in the margin thatÂ’s one of the single biggest post-convention changes in voter preferences.
Overall, WaPo/ABC puts it at McCain/Palin at +2, 49-47 among likelies. Among registered voters, Obama has a 47-46 edge; neither is significant. But McCain got a 4-point bounce.
Obama, for his part, shows little or no progress on his chief challenges – the question of his experience, the definition of the change he’d bring about and his efforts to entice former Hillary Clinton supporters aboard. Obama continues to lead McCain by a wide margin in enthusiasm, but his advantage on some key issues has softened.Notably, far more people see Obama than McCain as in tune with the economic problems Americans are experiencing – but in trust to handle the economy the gap between the two has narrowed to a slim 5-point Obama advantage. That speaks to McCain’s advantage on experience, expressed, for example, in his 17-point margin in trust to handle a crisis.
California Dreaming: Anyone watching FoxNews knows McCain is opening campaign offices in California and is considering -- or at least pretending to consider -- making a major play for California.
Currently they're down 12.
More: From the article now:
McCain has a 17-point lead on which candidate can best handle an unexpected crisis and, for the first time, a double-digit advantage as the one more trusted on international affairs. McCain also has a 10-point lead on dealing with the war in Iraq, an issue that voters had been divided on since the outset of the campaign.And on the dominant issue of the election, the economy, McCain has whittled Obama's advantage to a mere five points, the smallest it's been this year. McCain has also drawn even with Obama on energy policy and has sharply narrowed Obama's lead on dealing with the federal deficit and handling social issues such as abortion and gay civil unions. He's also turned around what had been a narrow Obama edge on being seen as the "stronger leader." The candidates remain rated roughly evenly on taxes, while McCain continues to hold a huge lead on the question of who would make a better commander in chief.
In addition, Obama still leads on the change question, but McCain/Palin have narrowed that considerably.
Those who are "very enthusiastic" for the ticket have doubled. (The power of The Two.)
Again, the bulk of this is due to a massive shift in opinions of white women, or as the MSM now knows them, "incorrigible racist bitches and ungrateful painted street-whores who ought to stay in the kitchen and out of the voting booth."
The Eagleton Scenario: Just mentioning it. It was all the rage a week ago. Gun to my head, I'd say it's still a 50/50 proposition.
I mean, this woman is just embarrassing the ticket. The only real question is whether it would be more embarrassing for McCain to dump this non-performing candidate.
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— Ace Well, when you put it like that...
Democrats speak up for the less prosperous; they have well-intentioned policies to help them; they are disturbed by inequality, and want to do something about it. Their concern is real and admirable. The trouble is, they lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt.Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists. If they only had the brains to vote in their interests, Democrats think, the party would never be out of power. But again and again, the Republicans tell their lies, and those stupid damned voters buy it.
I find it just baffling that Americans favor McCain-Palin over the Democrats' condescension.
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12:47 PM
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— Ace A caveat: Although this post is signed "Douglass Jessmer" (and yes, a search will confirm such a guy is in the MSM), we don't know it's actually him. Who knows, someone could have signed up to Poynter Online with a false name.
I'm particularly sensitive about posting this at all because, assuming it is a real guy, he's about to become extremely unpopular with his colleagues.
At any rate, responding to Poynter stub mocking the McCain camp's demand that the media treat Palin "with some respect and deference," this person posting under the name "Douglas Jessmer" lets a big cat out of a transparent bag. (Proper Link Added. Link Fixed.)
If you wonder why Republicans distrust the media, look how many of us are in the tank for Obama, no matter how covert that support may appear. (Just look at how many "O" icons you see in our Twitter profiles.) It's not just Chris Matthews' "tingle up my leg."Tell me: If Cindy McCain agreed to a television appearance only after the show's producers agreed not to discuss a list of issues, would you question it?
Michelle Obama did just that on "The View," and who made anything of it, outside of talk radio?
I get the feeling the McCain campaign wants to "protect" her so much as they want to be able to focus the campaign on substantive issues, not Bristol Palin's pregnancy or the Daily Kos's conspiracy theories.
It can't possibly be that Sarah Palin can't handle the media. I don't buy that for a second. The governor is a focused, driven woman, not a rambling Adm. James Stockdale (with due respect to the admiral).
All emphases mine.
Thanks to Looking Glass.
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11:51 AM
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— Ace Not just a diary, either. Multiple diaries.
You know, sometimes I just say things to be provocative. i thought it might be true that Obama had put it out the world to cool it on the unhelpful Palin-hate emanating from the leftwing blogosphere (which includes Andrew Sullivan, despite Howard Kurtz' ridiculous assertion he's "right-leaning"), but I didn't really have an assload of confidence in that. It was a trial balloon, really.
But this is getting kinda curious. We've now seen the NYT print a "We Love Baby Trig" article (by the way, I was trying to let you guys know to not worry about that with the whole "Media gets its marching orders" post), Andrew Sullivan has suddenly announced he's as proud as a beagle for Sarah Palin's decision to "bring up" Trig, and now the DKos is systematically deleting one of the sillier smears in a week where "one of the sillier smears" is genuinely a mark of distinction.
Is this all purely coincidentally? The smears seemed pretty coordinated, and now so does the walking-back of the smearing.
Are we really to believe Obama's most stalwart allies all decided it was politically unhelpful to keep smearing Palin and her family not only independently, but simultaneously?
The Man with the Golden Touch:
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Thirty-eight times in one day is directed action.Posted by: Auric Goldfinger
Sometimes these guys are so in-sync I suspect they're sharing some kind of Townhouse together or somethin'...
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11:17 AM
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— Ace Wow... sort of.
In the new survey, more voters call themselves Republicans. Now 48% say they're Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party; 47% say they're Republicans or lean to the GOP.Not since February 2005, right after Bush's second inauguration, have Republicans been within a single point of Democrats in party identification.
What's more, voters by 48%-45% support the Democratic candidate in their congressional district, the party's narrowest advantage this year.
I say that's "wow... sort of" because we all know sometimes polls get bad samples, with one party oversampled. Of course, this is usually the Democratic Party.
But of course it happens the other way too, on occasion -- and it seems to have happened here. The Democrats usually enjoy a 6-8 point split on party ID lately. Although it's possible the Republicans have suddenly narrowed that gap to nothing, I'd want to see a lot of confirmation on this before concluding that.
If this is a bad sample, it also throws into question that outsized ten point lead McCain-Palin now supposedly have (at least with likely voters).
But the Gallup Poll (and I think Gallup's own poll, which is just called the Gallup Poll, is different than the one they run for USAToday as the USAToday/Gallup poll) also has McCain-Palin up by 5 points:
That [six-point bounce] is slightly better than Barack ObamaÂ’s four-point bounce from 45% in Aug. 22-24 polling before the Democratic National Convention started to 49% immediately after it concluded. Since 1964, the typical convention bounce has been five percentage pointsÂ…McCainÂ’s current 49% share of the vote is his best performance in Gallup tracking to date. His five-point lead is his best since early May, when he led Obama by six points (48% to 42%). Obama has led throughout much of the campaign, and has led nearly all of the time since he clinched the Democratic nomination in early June.
As we know from 2000, 49% is basically a majority of the country at this point (because 2% will vote minor party).
Rasmussen shows a statistically insignificant one point lead for the McCain-Palin team.
The one point lead is insignificant, but the seven point shift in opinion (Obama was up six at his peak) is not.
Barack Obama: The One
McCain-Palin: The Two
Two > One.
Google it.
What if It's Real? It is possible the sudden shift in party ID is real -- but not particularly significant.
Most "independents" are not really all that independent. They don't like party labels -- either because they don't like labels generally ("I'm too complex for labels" -- um, no you're not; You get the label of the guy who thinks he's too complex for labels), or like thinking of themselves as "independent minded," or because they don't like the people actually running the parties -- but they are, in fact, mostly aligned with one party or the other.
Frank Luntz is always pointing this out. They say they're "independent." They're lying -- partly to themselves ("No way am I a Bible-thumping Repubican!") and partly to others to maintain the image of not being a "joiner" or a follower. When he focus-groups these independents -- well, really "undecided voters" -- he usually finds they actually have decided, pretty much, but just like saying they're uncommitted.
So they do have a poltiical ideology -- and it usually tracks more closely with one party or the other, and despite their protestations of being "undecided," they wind up supporting the candidate you'd expect them to support, based on demographics and basic ideology.
Now, the Repubican brand is "scarier" than the Democratic brand. It's easy to be a Democrat -- all the swells in Hollywood, all the stars in rock n' roll, all the nice smart unbiased reporters on CNN and MSNBC and the late-night talk shows are constantly putting out the message that being a Democrat shows you're smart, nice, educated, progressive, forward-thinking, and (crucially) cool and hip, while if you're a Republican, you're dumb, cruel, ignorant, retrrograde and you bitterly cling to your guns, religion, and hatred of Domincans, pus, of course, you're not only not cool, but you're totally judgmental and bogus and are probably a narc or somethin', man.
If anyone has made the transition from Democrat to Republican (as I have), you know what I'm talking about. Calling myself a Democrat in my youth was a cost-free choice. Hey, they were the cool guys.
My transition occurred over a series of steps: First I was a moderate Democrat who believed in a more capitalist vision of the economy and a decidedly more muscular military posture than the crazies in the party, plus a more punitive stance on crime, plus I was kind of skeptical about identity politics and quotas. And.... unions, too.
And quite frankly the environment, too. Who needs it?
At some point I realized that, um, I really wasn't a moderate Democrat at all, because all of those points were simply not Democratic positions at all, and I became, in my head, either a 'centrist who votes Democratic" or an "independent who votes Democratic."
And then I started splitting tickets and voting for Republicans a lot more. At this point I think I may have called myself a libertarian, not knowing really what the fuck it meant, just knowing it sounded cool and accurately reflected the fact I was not a Democrat, but also kept me far away from the despised Republican label.
And then I woke up one day, decided "Who the hell am I fooling anymore?," and decided I was comfortable enough with my sexuality to come out of the closet and admit I had a profound, unquenchable desire to fuck the working man and dirty foreigners (90% of whom probably have AIDS anyway).
The environment also probably has AIDS. You can't spell "Snail-Darter" without AIDS.
Point is, it's hard to call oneself a Republican. Much harder than it is to call oneself a Democrat. There are independents put-off by the Democratic brand, and yet who are ideologically reliably liberal (at least center-liberal), but I'm guessing there are about double or tripe the number of Repubican-ish independents who view the Republican lable as the Scarlet R for Repression and Repugnancy.
When someone makes the Republican label "cool" -- as Reagan did for a time, as Bush did for a briefer time, as the McCain/Palin Independents with Integrity ticket is doing now -- many of those Indpendents-in-Name-Onlies (IINO's) feel comfortable enough to admit what's kind of obvious to everyone but they themselves, that, given the binary choice of Republican or Democrat, they're on the red side of the ROYGBIV spectrum. Orange maybe, or maybe just yellow, but definitely lower-frequency.
So it is possible that we've suddenly seen all those Yellows and Orangres begin admitting they're Reddish.
But while this is possible, it's also not particularly significant-- the thing is, even without that self-identification (self-admission is more accurate) of their Republican leanings, they were probably going to vote for us anyway, "Independent" status be damned.
There is almost certainly some component of real net gains -- the McCain/Palin ticket appeals to those sick of partisan warfare, and also those sick to death of corruption and compromise (the bad kind) in Washington, and so some of these disaffected-Republicans-coming-home really do represent new votes we otherwise would not have gotten.
How many? Don't know. Some. It's an impossible question to poll on, because you can't ask,
Question 23. A few minutes ago you said you were an Independent, which was such a ridiculous lie I want to laugh in your fat lying face. And laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Now, when you stop yanking my crank for five frigin' minutes -- you don't embarrass me; you embarrass yourself -- what party do you really most closely identify with, and stop being such a fucking liar, Mr. Fatty McLieFace, and give me a straight answer for once?
but if they could ask that, they'd probably find the partisan split has never been as big as the polls indicate.
Either way, though, surely it's a good thing that people are feeling more pro-Republican now and are not so put off by the toxic designation.
Joke Theft: "Think about it... I haven't" stolen from the tremendously great Strangers with Candy.
Could possibly be a Stephen Colbert line (writing it, not speaking it), just to give a liberal props.
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09:54 AM
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— Slublog Time's Amy Sullivan asks the question.
There's only one thing missing from her article - actual quotes from evangelicals to back up her assertion. Most of the article is supposition or wrongheaded assumption. Truly shoddy work. Mark Hemingway at NRO debunks the ever-loving crap out of Sullivan's story.
Sarah Palin seems to have a secret power - she makes reporters forget how to do actual journalism.
[Ace]: A power she shares with Obama.
The McCain people just sent me their latest bumper sticker for comment. I can't scan it, so I'll just reproduce it with text.
Palin
Go fuck yourselves.
I like it! Simple, direct, and straight-talkin'.
Posted by: Slublog at
09:24 AM
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— Ace They pushed Trig Trutherism.
Michelle Malkin has scans of that Michelle Obama fashion-show spread I'd mentioned. I didn't bother to read the article on Palin (shocking, yes, that I didn't do my job), and so I missed the cutesy insinuation that Palin faked her pregnancy.
Did the "Republican author" of the article also write the sidebars and caption the photos? That seems like something the editorial staff does during the layout process.
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09:10 AM
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— Gabriel Malor The Alliance Defense Fund's next shit-stirring operation is to have multiple churches and pastors give explicitly political sermons to provoke a lawsuit. I foresee Rule 11 sanctions and bar discipline for the lawyers involved in this hare-brained scheme.
Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.
"For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church," ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. "It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It's not for the government to mandate the role of church in society."
This is, in a word, stupid. Of course clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits. They can endorse 'til they are blue in the face. They are free to hold bake sales and raffles to raise money for political advocacy, if that's what they want to do. No one is stopping them.
But take heed: no one has a right to tax-exempt status. If churches want the benefits that come from being 501(c)(3)-eligible, they must behave according to rules established by Congress and the IRS. Among other things, they must not devote a substantial part of their activities to attempting to influence legislation and they must not participate in, or intervene in, any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.
The ADF claims that the purpose of these restrictions is to silence churches and prevent religion from influencing public policy. That is simply untrue. The point is that churches should not have to worry about things like taxes. We also want contributions to churches to be tax-deductible (in order to encourage such contributions).
But we don't want contributions to political advocacy to be tax-deductible. In effect, by allowing churches to participate in political campaigns, the ADF wants to create a method of making tax-deductible contributions to political campaigns. This is a form of political money-laundering and it results in too much entanglement between churches and our government.
Now, I'm certain the ADF knows this, which is why my first thought was sanctions and discipline when I read the article. These lawyers are on thin ice. Most bar associations have rules to the effect that a lawyer shall not counsel or assist a client in engaging in criminal or fraudulent conduct. Now, a church engaging in political activity is not a crime or fraud. But inducing a client to engage in frivolous litigation may be. These people should know better.
Exit question: Why is it the two or three most vocal Christian-advocacy organizations in this country have to be so embarrassing?
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— Gabriel Malor
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— Slublog
Barack Obama has made his experience as a community organizer part of his presidential campaign. During the Democrat convention, speakers heaped praise upon his decision to do job, saying it displayed his compassion and concern for the common man. Earlier this summer, Byron York looked at Obama's record to see what he had accomplished in that position.
Short answer: not all that much:
The long-term goal was to retrain workers in order to restore manufacturing jobs in the area; Kellman took Obama by the rusted-out, closed-down Wisconsin Steel plant for a firsthand look. But the whole thing was a bit of a pipe dream, as the leaders soon discovered. “The idea was to interview these people and look at education, transferable skills, so that we could refer them to other industries,” Loretta Augustine-Herron told me as we drove by the site of the old factory, now completely torn down. “Well, they had no transferable skills. I remember interviewing one man who ran a steel-straightening machine. It straightened steel bars or something. I said, well, what did you do? And he told me he pushed a button, and the rods came in, and he pushed a button and it straightened them, and he pushed a button and it sent them somewhere else. That’s all he did. And he made big bucks doing it.”In other words, the complexities of this situation would require more than simply getting people agitated enough to demand that someone toss them a few bucks in the name of economic development. Solving this problem would require an understanding of the economic realities of the steel industry, working with the unions to develop effective retraining programs for the workers and being an advocate for this community to the city government. What these people needed was someone who was willing to take the time to understand their situation and look for long-term solutions to deal with the changing economy. They needed someone who could work with government to ensure they had the training and skills that would attract employers to the area so they weren't so dependent upon one industry.That, of course, was one of the reasons the steel mill closed. And it became clear that neither Obama nor Kellman nor anyone else was going to change the direction of the steel industry and its unions in the United States. Somewhere along the line, everyone realized that those jobs wouldn’t be coming back.
So Obama looked for new opportunities...
Obviously, that person was not Barack Obama. Guess he felt actually rolling up his sleeves and working was below his pay grade.
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