Month: August 2008

The bad news for the Democrat is that the press has decided that Obama is acting too uppity/presidential. The good news is that the alternative story line would be his unreadiness to be president. If he had to pick …

So far, Obama has more detail in his proposals than McCain. I thought he was running on celebrity?

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 12.45 pm.

Can you imagine how he’d run against McCain in a general election? He’d put together an ad simply clipping those moments – and they’re not rare – when McCain pauses, searches for words, blinks heavily and seems out of it. He’d play the age card as brutally as some Republicans play the race card. Then he’d put together a temper ad, throw in a little "bomb, bomb Iran" footage, and craft an LBJ daisy ad, raising fears about McCain’s eagerness to start a nother war in the Middle East. I don’t think Obama should go there, because I don’t think he needs to and it would violate his core appeal. But others will. Check this out.

A sign of the times in Delaware.

Necessary but classy.

A somewhat effective unofficial response to the latest McCain fusillade:

In general, I think there’s too much whining from the Dems right now and not enough pro-active argument for the Obama candidacy. This kind of grass-roots response is the best way to respond to Rovian tactics.

Doing better than the Clintons predicted:

even among white workers — a group of voters that has been targeted by both parties as a key to victory in November — Obama leads McCain by 10 percentage points, 47 percent to 37 percent, and has the advantage as the more empathetic candidate.

Among blacks and Hispanics, it’s a wipe-out.

Nate Silver’s take:

If Obama is underperforming a Generic Democrat, that is presumed to reflect some or another weakness of Obama’s. But it could just as easily reflect some or another strength of John McCain’s — such as his perceived moderation. Since Obama was polling ahead of non-McCain Republicans by blowout margins, I would argue that the latter is more likely.

McCain was the smartest credible pick for the GOP, and his residual reputation for moderation and independence is still working in his favor. McCain’s real danger is looking more like an establishment Bush/Rove Republican. Which is why picking Romney for veep would probably sink him.

The NYT story today had some remarkable details, primarily about how the investigation was almost comically unserious from the get-go. Were the feds even trying? Greenwald has more questions here. One begins to wonder if those at the top of the executive branch were even sending signals that finding the actual culprit was not so important, especially if it exculpated Saddam against whom they had already decided to go to war:

Mr. Holt said in a recent interview that his first doubts came after anthrax was found in his Congressional office in October 2001 but investigators never returned to conduct systematic testing to trace the path of the anthrax spores.

After that, he said, when contamination at a New Jersey postal processing center indicated that the letters had been mailed on one of a limited number of routes, it took investigators seven months to test several hundred mailboxes and identify the source.

“Within two days they could have dispatched 50 people to wipe all those mailboxes,” Mr. Holt said. He wrote to Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, on Friday to ask that he testify to Congress about the investigation as soon as it is closed.

When investigators questioned people around the Princeton mailbox about whether they had seen a suspect there, they showed passers-by photos of only Dr. Hatfill, according to local residents who were questioned. Criminologists said that only by showing photos of a number of people could investigators have confidence in an eyewitness identification of Dr. Hatfill or any other suspect.

Some experts also questioned the F.B.I.’s use of bloodhounds from local police departments to try to trace a scent from the recovered letters to suspects’ homes, including that of Dr. Hatfill.

Law enforcement sources at the time said the bloodhounds’ reactions at Dr. Hatfill’s apartment were one reason for the F.B.I.’s intense focus on him. But independent bloodhound handlers said it was highly unlikely that a useful scent could be obtained from letters that might have been handled by the perpetrator with gloves, had rubbed against thousands of other scents in the mail and then were irradiated to kill the dangerous spores.

Under normal circumstances, the cock-up version of history is almost always preferable to the conspiracy theory. But after what we’ve found out about this administration, a reasonable doubt endures.