Month: November 2008

"I cannot foresee a scenario that John McCain is elected president of the United States," – Frank Luntz, on the BBC today.

Rex Wockner reports from the terrifying mass Christianist rally against marriage equality in San Diego and the thousands of protestors against Prop 8 in the streets of the city afterward.

He endorses McCain. Obama fires back with some serious snark:

President Bush is sitting out the last few days before the election. But earlier today, Dick Cheney came out of his undisclosed location and hit the campaign trail. He said that he is, and I quote, “delighted to support John McCain.” I’d like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it.

There’s a reason Cheney needs McCain elected. He needs to avoid prosecution for war crimes and only a McCain-Palin administration can assure he won’t.

Radley Balko passes along this pro-prop 1 ad:

Jacob Sullum has more information on Drug Policy initiatives on ballots across the country.

Reihan further explains his endorsement of McCain:

Is McCain, as the subhed has it, the “best man” to unite America? Well, I think he’d have to be. Let me stress that “uniting America” isn’t necessarily the highest priority of the next president — perhaps Barack Obama would not “unite with” about 35 percent of the country that is bitterly opposed to his agenda, and I think that’s fair nough. But McCain would, in my view, be forced to unite America because he became the standard-bearer of a minority faction in our politics. How could McCain govern without engaging in really radical outreach to Democrats and independents?

Writing the op-ed was tough. As I’ve noted to you guys, I have slightly odd views about this election. I think that partisan intensity matters, and that shared ownership of American foreign policy matters: both of these things suggest that an Obama victory would be a good thing, though I disagree with Obama on many issues. That said, independent of the campaign (absurd, I know), I think that McCain would be a solid president, and that he’d have an opportunity to reframe our politics in a good and constructive way. If this sounds like faint praise, it is.

Overarchingly, I think both candidates are hilariously unprepared for the nature and scale of the challenges they’re likely to face. Mitt Romney has a far wider range of relevant domestic experience than either of them. That’s not to say he’d necessarily make a better president — he has character flaws, lest we forget. But boy, I haven’t been as encouraged as many of my friends about these guys.

Larison ponders the phenomenon:

Everyone who is voting Obama to punish the GOP thinks that there is some small chance that the GOP might change its ways.  The diversity of views among Obamacons reflects how many different future directions are expected, guaranteeing that many will be disappointed, but it also reflects how badly the GOP has failed on multiple fronts that it is simultaneously losing so many prominent and obscure Catholic pro-lifers, libertarians, foreign policy realists, moderates and small-government conservatives, among others, to a Democratic nominee who genuinely is the most liberal of any they have had since 1972.

Under normal circumstances, a vote for Obama ought to be unthinkable for almost all of the people on the right who have endorsed him, but the GOP has failed so badly that it has made the unthinkable mundane and ordinary.  It’s reaching a point where the report of another Obamacon endorsement is no more remarkable than when the leaves start falling in autumn.  Far more important in the aftermath than coming up with new and amusing ways to mock the Obama endorsers is an effort to understand and remedy the profound failures that made this phenomenon possible before a major realignment does occur.   

Still AWOL. No explanation. Not even a gesture, which suggests to me that some in the McCain camp realize they’d rather release nothing than be implicated in anything that might hurt them after the election. Only ABC News’ Kate Snow seems to care. Only this blog has really pursued this story for two long months. For the record, I find the idea that a vice-presidential candidate refuses to either give a press conference or release full medial records as a dreadful precedent for transparency. Obama and Biden and McCain have been pathetic as well. But no one has been as secretive as Palin and no one else has similar strangeness in her medical history. Presumably the records are there and could have been released easily two months ago. Unless there really was no vetting at all and the McCain camp is now covering up its own incompetence as well as preparing to throw her under the bus in a few days’ time.

McCain has been doing better there, especially in the West of the state – surprise!. Silver:

The Pennslyvania polls have probably tightened by more than one point, although it is important to note that the four polls that show the state in the mid- single digits (Rasmussen, Mason-Dixon, ARG and Strategic Vision) have all had Republican leans so far this cycle. Pennsylvania is still an extreme long shot for John McCain — Obama is more likely to win Arizona than McCain the Keystone — just not quite the long-shot that it had looked like a couple of days ago.

That’s worth absorbing as a statistical likelihood:

Obama is more likely to win Arizona than McCain the Keystone.

You can see a graph of all the Pennsylvania polls here.

The SUSA poll on Proposition 8 on October 6 found the proposition winning by 47 to 42 percent, with 10 percent undecided. Today’s SUSA poll shows the proposition losing by 50 to 47 percent, with 3 percent undecided. Still too close to call, but the momentum seems to have shifted against the proposition and in favor of keeping marriage legal for gay couples in California. Keep going, guys.