Who's a socialist?

Barack Obama's a socialist because he's going to "spread the wealth?"

Really?

Economic Events and the McCain Campaign

A meme developing among the mainstream media and Republicans is that McCain is losing because of the economy and there's nothing he or his campaign could have done about it. Republican advisor Mark McKinnon:

If not for a major economic event that interceded a few weeks ago (for which a strong majority of voters blame Republicans), this race might still be competitive. It isn’t Steve Schmidt’s fault. It’s the economy, stupid.

Branch Rickey, the executive that signed Jackie Robinson, is credited with saying that "luck is the residue of design."

I understand why Republicans want to blame the market collapse for McCain's problems, but I just don't think the idea that it is what killed him holds water.

First, I think it misses the fact that other important things were happening independently in the second half of September. McCain's convention bounce was wearing off, the public was getting to know Palin, and those who had just started to pay attention discovered that Obama wasn't the guy the Republicans had made him out to be (in part because Obama was cleaning McCain's clock in the debates).

Second, and this is related to Palin and the debate performances, McCain himself increased the damage to his campaign from the economic crisis. He entered the general election campaign proposing more Bush-style tax cuts for the rich, inexplicably leaving Obama a wide opening to propose more tax cuts for the middle class. He also failed to become more knowledgeable about economic issues and failed to select a running mate that could help him on those issues, even though it was becoming clear in the summer that the economy would be a major concern. Worse, he continued claiming that the "fundamentals of the economy are strong". Finally, his reaction to the crisis - transparent political posturing - was not reassuring. He took credit for the bailout before it passed even though he contributed nothing to the process, then took credit for slowing it down when it failed. These are self-inflicted wounds.

This was an inhospitable climate for any Republican, but if any Republican could win, the McCain of 2000 had a fighting chance. However, he failed to separate himself from Bush. He should have shifted after the primaries to running as a Democrat with more military and foreign policy credentials. Perhaps, instead of Bush's compassionate conservatism, a tough liberalism. He blew it. Maybe he should have learned something from his idol, Teddy Roosevelt, who went in a new direction following McKinley.

Aggressively Ignorant

halloween comes early...

it may be no surprise to anyone reading this blog that i identify as a democrat or that i will be voting for obama in november. but i don't hate republicans. in fact, some of the people i love most in this world are life-long republicans. but some of the vitriol coming out of mccain-palin rallies in these final days makes me physically sick to my stomach. i knew racism and xenophobia and religious hatred still existed in this country-- hell, there are plenty of hate groups out there with multi-million dollar budgets based on the sole goal of making me a second class citizen-- but i had no idea it was this bad. or this blatant. i have never been so sad for our country. and for the first time i actually wonder if i will ever be truly proud of us again.

Nuts Over ACORN

This is such a ridiculous controversy. The GOP story carried in the liberal media gives the impression that ACORN is actively attempting to file false voter registrations in an effort to steal the election. HuffPo explains that the truth is very different:

The media has been all too happy to pass that garbage on, without bothering to note that, in fact, the organization attempts to authenticate every registration form their workers submit and by law they must turn in every form to election officials -- even if they find a registration to be fraudulent when they call the phone number submitted on the form, or if the forms are otherwise suspect or incomplete.

They do so, and they flag all questionable registration forms as being suspect before turning them in to officials.

ACORN casts a wide net to get as many people registered as possible. Part of that effort is hiring people to register voters and paying per registration form. As a result, they receive some false forms that are in no way going to be used for voting. As Obama notes, the only victim of fraud here is ACORN, who has paid people with the expectation of getting valid registrations.

Nevertheless, registering a million voters and getting tens of thousands of false registration forms is still a success. Yglesias:

I find that an awful lot of problems are caused by people’s inability to understand things like error rates and big numbers. If a pharmaceutical company came out with a new anti-depression drug and gave it to a million people suffering from depression, of whom 970,000 were helped you wouldn’t turn around and conclude that the company was perpetrating a deliberate fraud based on the fact that “tens of thousands” of patients got no relief. You’d say that the medicine was helpful in 97 percent of the indicated cases. ACORN is trying — and succeeding — in an effort to register a lot of new voters.

There’s simply no way to gather over one million new voter registration forms without some of the forms having been filled out with bogus information. You could ask the group to automatically toss out the obviously wrong ones — some guy saying he’s Tony Romo, someone else saying he’s Mickey Mouse — but the law requires them to hand all the forms in to prevent them from tossing out forms filled out by people who say they want to register Republican. Consequently, if you go out and register over a million voters you’ll wind up with a lot of bad forms being submitted. But just as 30,000 is a lot of people and also only a very small fraction of one million people, when you’re talking about registering over a million new voters you’d need orders of magnitude more bad forms to constitute real evidence of a systematic fraud campaign.

I agree with Yglesias that the best solution to this problem is to make it easier to vote instead of requiring registration weeks or months in advance.

Voter suppression, often carried out in the name of preventing voter fraud, distorts the electoral process far more than actual voter fraud. The outcomes of both the 2000 and 2004 elections may have been altered by voter suppression.

What's Scarier Than a Black Muslim?

Luckovich:


I love this quote from an Obama canvasser in Pennsylvania, reported on Ben Smith's blog at The Politico:

"What's crazy is this," he writes. "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."