Short story: Palin unlawfully abused her power in firing her state’s public safety commissioner.

My take: John “Original Maverick” “Campaign Stunt” McCain will use this opportunity as a last gasp at reversing his fortunes — Palin bows out, Mitt “I’m a Businessman” Romney steps in.

Will it work? I doubt it. But it’s the best chance he’s got, and I’d bet good money that he’ll do it. If I had any.

Jim Bourg/AP

No debate roundup today, simply because there are myriad roundups out there and my voice would add little. However, I do want to touch on the one thing everyone seems to be deeming newsworthy.

Almost right out of the gate, John McCain announced during the debate that he wants $300 billion to “buy up bad mortgages” (full-but-brief details on the plan here). First off, this authority is already part of the current bailout plan, although it’s uncertain whether the government will exercise this right. Secondly, however, McCain also mentioned a “spending freeze” on everything except military, veterans affairs and an amorphous “other necessary projects” (paraphrase).

Which is it, senator? A freeze or a new massive bailout lite? Even the usually lockstep Mitt Romney is wondering, says Marc Ambinder:

Mitt Romney on Fox News struggled to explain how McCain would pay for his new proposal…admitting that he didn’t know, but said that it was important to note that McCain was doing something to alleviate pain. (Romney didn’t seem very convinced.)

Exhibit A: William Ayers (rhymes with "Who Cares")

Earlier this election cycle, John McCain’s campaign decided to go increasingly negative. Ads were cut that — instead of first challenging the man’s policy ideas or even his qualifications — attempted to make a mockery of Barack Obama’s “celebrity.” (These, notably, were followed by Sarah “Barracuda” Palin’s emergence from relative obscurity as a bona fide Republican celebrity.)

Rest of post and discussion after the jump.

(more…)

I thought this was worth sharing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ&eurl=http://vodpod.com/watch/1049884-breaking-news-homer-simpson-tries-to-vote-for-obama[/youtube]

1.) For once, a non-media conservative defending journalists for doing the work they’re supposed to do.

Larison says (and you should really click here and read the whole thing):

When someone at a restaurant asked Palin a question about Pakistan that generated some controversy because it seemed to contradict McCain’s previous statement at the debate, the McCain campaign dubbed it “gotcha journalism” and right away when Gibson stumped Palin with his Bush Doctrine question there was a great hue and cry about the “gotcha” nature of this question.  Apparently the questions on her reading habits and Court rulings has also been defined as a “gotcha” question by Palin supporters, even though it is as certain as the sun rising that journalists will ask nominees their views on judicial philosophy and Court rulings … In other words, the “gotcha” is no longer an ambush — it can include any question to which the candidate really should have an answer. …

When this year’s rulings came down, the presidential nominees either volunteered their opinions on the rulings or they were asked about them.  McCain denounced Boumediene and endorsed Heller. Obama supported both, which caused him some trouble because he had said that he thought the D.C. gun ban was constitutional …  If Ifill asks these questions tonight, is she playing “gotcha” or trying to gain information and a window into the candidate’s reasoning and understanding of the relevant policies?  This might be worth sorting out in advance so that we’ll know which flubbed answers to ignore and which ones are important.  If all questions are now “gotcha,” maybe we can just skip watching the debate and go have a drink. [bolds mine-R]

2.) Speaking of Gwen Ifill…

This is the argument: The moderator of tonight’s debate, a woman who is known throughout Washington for being a fair interviewer (and far from tabloid-esque, as with the more partisan likes of MSNBC or Fox News), is writing a book about “politics in the age of Obama.” She is black.

This has been translated into “she’s a member of the liberal media and is writing a book about politics in the age of Obama.”

This is the intellectually dishonest bomb-throwing that otherwise engaged people like myself simply detest, no matter which side of the aisle is throwing it. First, a book about the changing fortunes of black politicians is a far cry from a book “about” Obama or (as some have called it) “PRO-Obama” — she hasn’t event written the chapter about Obama yet. Secondly, do we think Bob Woodward would be a bad moderator? He’s written books about politicians, and all of them have been tough, hard-nosed — and ultimately fair. (There’s a reason President Bush keeps sitting down with the man, even though his books on the Bush White House have provided plenty of embarrassment.)

This is how it stands: Those who begin whining about “unfairness” are usually doing it because they know they’re losing (see previous post on the landslide that now seems imminent)… when Sean Hannity et al brought the Jeremiah Wright story to the forefront, Obama never claimed the story wasn’t credible because it was being reported by a right-leaning news organization; the story was true and so the questions were justified. He tried to spin it, sure, but not by beating up on the press. I’m guessing that’s because he knew he was winning then, and he surely knows he’s winning now.

This once looked presumptuous... now it's looking like a pretty sure bet.

Despite how close the presidential race has been (yes, past tense, you’ll see why in a moment), for months I’ve been predicting a Obama victory, quite often with the words “I don’t see how the guy can lose.” I know, I know… Racism still exists, sure, and plenty of people still buy the notion that Republicans are the only people who can manage the military. But it’s just seemed, to me, a stretch that Americans by and large are going to vote for a man who’s so old and so utterly Washington (despite his somewhat plausible increasingly hollow claims to the contrary) when they have a chance to vote for another whose image, at least, is diametrically opposite of the lowest-approval-ratings-since-the-Nixon-era President Bush. Intellectual instead of bumbling? Check. Digests information instead of relying on an empty gut? Check. Fresh-faced and full of vigor instead of grey-haired and increasingly harried? Check.

So far, however, I’ve been mostly in the wilderness on this. So imagine my surprise to find that Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative — a man who’s voting Baldwin, no less, and has very little nice to say about Obama — has predicted the same today.

Now that it is becoming increasingly clear that McCain is going to lose in a blowout (and here I must acknowledge that I never imagined this would happen and assumed the electorate would remain evenly divided), what will be the aftermath within the GOP?

(His answer, by the way, is worth reading in full.)

Doom and gloom, say you McCainiacs reading this? I’m sorry to have to tell you this… well, I’ll just let today’s electoral count from Politico tell the tale:

(See also The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, “ObamaPollSplosion: He Breaks 50 Everywhere”)

…instead of real-ity.

Some 52.4 million people watched Friday night’s debate. That may seem like a lot, but it’s actually 16 percent fewer than watched the first debate between President Bush and John Kerry in 2004 — and despite the fact that 12 networks (all the majors, all the newsies and a few you probably don’t get) aired it live.

Why the drop? It could be because more people chose to enjoy their Friday nights out on the town, planning to watch it via Web the next day. (As far as I know, there’s no data on how many have watched it this way, nor even a way to accurately compile such data. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Bush-Kerry debate was on a Thursday night.)

But still, the numbers are surprising. Isn’t this “the most important election of our lifetime”? Isn’t this supposed to be the most exciting election in the history of the universe? More to the point, about 38 million watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, and about 500,000 more than that watched McCain’s.

Let that sink in for a minute. Assuming that two-thirds of the people who watched one candidate’s acceptance speech did not watch the other’s — and, based on my totally unscientific discussions with partisans on both sides the days after each acceptance speech, that’s a pretty good guess — it’s likely that fewer people watched the debate than watched at least one of the acceptance speeches.

Real questions by a real person, vs. speeches given via TelePrompTer. Do we really care where they stand?

Recent events lead me to think otherwise. Consider how much the debate coverage focuses on personality/image/composure (McCain didn’t look at Obama! Obama didn’t have any good zingers!), while policy differences are simplified and utterly false statements are just left hanging in the air (Pakistan was not a “failed state,” as McCain chastised; Obama and Michelle are coming up on their 16th anniversary, not 15th… I bet he’s in the doghouse!).

Debates are boring. I get it — I’m not even excited about Thursday’s between Palin and Biden, despite the fact that it’s bound to be rife with comic value on both sides. But seriously! The day we’d rather hear a prepared speech than an actual spontaneous discussion on the issues is the day we’ve lost the right to complain. (Re: Bush 2000′s “steady hand” vs. Bush 2008′s stubborn refusal to consider things commonly known as “facts.”)

P.S.: This should tell you a good deal about the intelligence of the average voter. (VodPodded at right, but bigger-screen here.)

I always forget how boring these things really are. But seriously…

First off, I was pleasantly surprised on the format. So much better than the standard “90-second response, 60-second rebuttal” than we’ve seen so much of in the past. Barack Obama was definitely cooler, but was he too cool? If you’d been watching with the sound off (as Sarah Palin does with “SNL”), you’d have thought John McCain was a bit deranged… the strangely Joker-esque smile that seemed to pop up every time Obama issued some sort of criticism.

On substance, Obama was doubtless the winner, if only because he kept steering McCain’s criticisms back to relevant facts. But he never had a real body-blow against McCain, at least not the kind that politicos like me get excited about. McCain is still throwing a lot of chips on the notion that voters really care about The Surge® (which definitely is/was a tactic, not a “strategy”), and I thought Obama’s relentless refocusing on Afghanistan showed him as a new kind of Democrat, one who’s not going to be bowled over on national security as Kerry and Gore before him.

McCain was much more on the attack; for almost every question, he seemed to have a prepared zinger about some thing that Obama “supported” or “opposed” — most of them distortions, especially that bit about “negotiating without preconditions” and whether Henry Kissenger favored such a thing or not. (He does… Sullivan quickly up with this.)

I’ve got to put together the newspaper now… but a few other notes: Olbermann notes McCain wore no flag pin! … Jim Lehrer is great, even if he does look like an owl … McCain still using old lines (“I don’t know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue”) … McCain implicitly admits what neither he nor many of his GOP colleagues ever has, which is that the U.S. has tortured people.

Who wrote the following?

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League. …

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. … If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true. …

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

Michael Moore? Keith Olbermann? Howard Dean? Nope. It’s by Kathleen Parker, the stinging, stalwart conservative answer to Maureen Dowd.

Finally, someone gets it… The election can be about experience or personality, but it can’t be about both — and the economic events of the past couple weeks (along with the Georgia-Russia showdown, which is fading from memory) are bringing voters’ attention back to policy more than at any other time in my lifetime.

McCain and Obama both have great stories. War hero vs. biracial kid with a single mom and meager means. Maverick who goes against his party at times, but very publicly, vs. newcomer who’s relatively untested but who echoes Kennedy in both vision and inspiration. Oldest president vs. first black non-white president. But it’s not the stories that matter now, not when gas prices are high, home sales are stagnant, job loss is real, a generation of borrowers is going to be forced to rethink its habits.

Palin, as evidenced by the Couric interview (see previous post) and others, is not up to this task. Democrats know it (and are probably too excited about it), Republicans sense it (but quell it with talk of her “commonness” and that old shattered “glass ceiling”) — the question is, does John McCain care? He may be willing to lose an election to win a war (whatever that means), but is he willing to risk the nation’s leadership in the hands of a person who makes “George W. Bush look like Cicero,” if God forbid something should happen to him?

In the midst of a very long, very funny and sometimes very harsh reaction to John McCain’s last-minute pullout from appearing on “The Late Show,” David Letterman made this astute point:

Here’s what happens. The economy is about to “crater,” and you’re a senator, a fourth-term senator from Arizona. You go back to Washington, you handle what you need to handle. Don’t suspend your campaign! You let your campaign go on, shouldered by your vice presidential nominee. That’s what you do.

The conservative pundits who don’t spend their time “spinning” everything, but who simply analyze objectively through Republican visors, are seeing this move for what it is: A stunt, and one with no obvious upside.

(Watch a condensed version of Dave’s rant here, or scroll further for the rest of the blog entry. Note particularly, late in the clip, when they grab the live feed from CBS Evening News, where McCain found time to go on with Katie Couric. Hmmm…)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjkCrfylq-E[/youtube]

Obama got in a great dig yesterday, saying a president will need to do “more than one thing at once.” Andrew Sullivan notes that most Americans want the debate to go on:

A majority of Americans say the debate should be held. Just 10% say the debate should be postponed. A sizable percentage of Americans, 36%, think the focus of the debate should be modified to focus more on the economy. 3 of 4 Americans say the presidential campaign should continue. Just 14% say the presidential campaign should be suspended. If Friday’s debate does not take place 46% of Americans say that would be bad for America.

What, realistically, is McCain going to do, other than vote? Neither he nor Obama are on the relevant steering committees for the legislation, and their presence will only bring a lot of photographers into an already hurried and frantic situation. It’s not as if you can’t vote, then go debate.

The most straight-up, honest opinion of this I’ve read came from Politico’s Arena, where each day a number of notables, intellectuals, pundits and personalities comment on an issue of the day. This was the response from a guy named Mickey Edwards, a Princeton lecturer and former Republican congressman:

Oh, brother. What idiot came up with this stunt?

It ranks somewhere on the stupidity scale between plain silly and numbingly desperate. McCain and Obama are both members of the senate and they’re both able to help craft a solution if they wish to do so without putting the presidential campaign on hold; after all, I’m sure congressional leaders would be willing to accept their calls if they have some important insights to impart. And while one of them will eventually become president, neither one is president yet, nor is either one a member of the congressional leadership; I’m confident that somehow the administration and the other 533 members of congress will be able to muddle through without tapping into the superior wisdom and intellect of their nominees. Sorry, john; it really sounds like you’re afraid to debate. This sounds like the sort of ploy we used to use in junior high school elections. [bold mind-R]

P.S.: Apologies to any McCain-loving readers out there; I’m honestly not trying to rake your guy over the coals on a regular basis. But he (or more accurately, his campaign) continues to engage in dishonest behavior, press-bashing and cheap stunts, which happen to be a big part of the vision of this blog. When Obama’s campaign pulls this stuff, I’ll have harsh words for them, too. In the meantime, check out this clip of Joe Biden, who obviously has gotten a little dusty on his American — and technological — history:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noIfl1UcCZE&eurl=http://vodpod.com/watch/1032501-biden-rewrites-history[/youtube]