Everyone from MoveOn and DailyKos to Pajamas Media and Next Right to Wikipedia and Reddit are begging Barack Obama and John McCain to change the rules so that the third debate won’t be so mind numbingly boring as the first two.
It’s not going to happen: The “debates” are boring precisely because both candidates’ reps negotiated the rules in such a way as to minimize the chance of their guy screwing up. McCain might be willing to go for something more freewheeling at this point, given that he’s got a lot of ground to make up, but it’s almost inconceivable that Obama will go along.
No matter. As Walter Mears, who’s been covering these things since well before I was born, reminds us the last debate never matters unless it’s also the first. And sometimes not even then.
That is in large part because the debates tend to reinforce impressions and opinions rather than to change them markedly. The first President Bush probably wouldn’t have suffered so severely for glancing at his watch in a 1992 TV debate but for the impression that he was disengaged and out of touch. Bush got one more chance in a third debate, but it didn’t help. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot took turns criticizing him, and Clinton held his plurality in the polls and in the election.
When Michael Dukakis got an ambush question — whether he’d change his view on capital punishment if his wife were raped and murdered — he said no, dryly, he’d still be against the death penalty. That fit the adverse image of the emotionless bureaucrat, which was the way Republicans wanted Dukakis viewed.
John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon debated four times in 1960, but the first in the series is the only one much remembered now. That was the night a haggard Nixon looked terrible on television, to Kennedy’s lasting advantage. Their final debate was notable because Kennedy had just advocated U.S. support for Cuban forces in exile who might overthrow Fidel Castro. In the debate, Nixon called the idea dangerous, although he actually supported secret administration planning for such operations. The upshot, after Kennedy became president, was the failed invasion attempt at the Bay of Pigs.
In 1976, the next campaign in which candidates debated, President Gerald R. Ford made a debilitating mistake in the second debate by claiming there was no Soviet domination of eastern Europe. Jimmy Carter capitalized on the blunder, and Ford couldn’t fashion a comeback in their third debate. It was a subdued standoff, to Carter’s advantage.
McCain’s doing so badly at this point that he’s got folks like Christopher Buckley rooting for the other team. He’s down to running ads (and having his ignoramus of a VP nominee) accusing his opponent of being a terrorist sympathizer.
I honestly don’t know what a “game changer” looks like at this point.
Barack Obama, flush with cash, is buying 30 minute spots — so far on ABC and NBC — that will air on the anniversary of Black Tuesday. James Hibberd and Paul J. Gough:
The Obama campaign is producing a nationwide pitch to voters that will air on at least two broadcast networks. The ad will run Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. — less than a week before the general election.
The direct purchase of such a large block of national airtime right before an election used to be more commonplace before campaigns began to focus their endgame strategies exclusively on battleground states. Such a move is not without precedent in modern presidential politics, however — Ross Perot did a similar purchase in 1992.
The special is a smart move for the Obama campaign, said Larry Sabato, a political analyst and director of the Center of Politics at the University of Virginia. “Obama’s theme is not just change but unity, so he’s appealing to the whole nation rather than a handful of tossup states,” Sabato said. “He wants to win the popular vote by a good margin, which will enable him to govern.”
And he’s got the cash for it, Sabato said. “This is another indication, if there needs to be any more, that Barack Obama’s got more money than (available) television time to buy,” said Evan Tracey, COO of the Campaign Media Analysis Group in Arlington, Va.
While he’s blowing McCain’s doors off in fundraising, the fact of the matter is that Obama Plus DNC is roughly equal to McCain Plus RNC; the difference is in autonomy, not financing.
Regardless, this is an interesting play by Team Obama. I’m not sure who the audience is for a 30 minute infomercial — I’m a political junkie and am unlikely to watch — but time’s running out to spend the money, so why not? We’ll see whether he throws in a set of Ginsu knives to go along with the no cost health care (paid for by only the top 5 percent!) and magic energy pony.
I got a CNN breaking news alert a few minutes ago informing me that the Dow had dropped more than 500 points in the opening minutes of trading. It has already recovered:
Stocks staged a huge turnaround Friday morning, with the Dow erasing most of a 700-point slide as fears of a global recession were countered by a willingness of some traders to step in at five-year lows.
The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) was down 40 points in the early going after having fallen nearly 700 points. The Standard & Poor’s 500 (SPX) index was down modestly and the Nasdaq composite (COMP) rose.
Developing….
I’d advise holding off jumping from tall buildings for the nonce.
The latest media meme is that McCain rallies are full of angry, bitter (and presumably racist) Americans who hate Obama. Both, apparently, are based a single rally yesterday in Waukesha, Wisconsin — and just two outbursts from the crowd, at that.
Slate’s John Dickerson was on the case last night with a piece titled “A Republican Mob Scene: John McCain’s supporters are madder (and scarier!) than he is.”
At a normal campaign rally, it’s the candidate who tries to whip the crowd into a frenzy. At John McCain’s town hall in Waukesha, Wis., Thursday, it was the other way around. “I’m mad, and I’m really mad,” said one man who’d been called on to ask a question. “It’s not the economy. It’s the socialist taking over our country.” McCain started to respond, and the man shot back sternly. “Let me finish please. When you have an Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of the hooligans up there gonna run this country, we’ve got to have our head examined. It’s time that you two who are representing us, and we are mad.”
After the crowd stopped chanting “USA,” McCain promised that he would take on Obama and the Democrats (and wisely didn’t choose the moment to present his case for the financial bailout or his plan to have the government buy mortgages). Before the question-and-answer portion of the rally, McCain had already clobbered Obama several times. But the audience stuffed into the gymnasium at a local sports center wasn’t satisfied.
A man suggested McCain talk about abortion to draw the distinction between him and Obama. Another asked, “Why is Obama where he’s at? Everyone in this room is stunned. We are all a product of our associations. Is there not a way to get around this media and line up the people” whom he is associated with? (No one in the press corps could hear the end of the man’s statement because the crowd roar was so loud. Each advice-giver was cheered like a hero.)
James T. Harris, a local African-American talk-show host, stood and said, “I doubt that anyone in this room has taken, pardon me, the ass-whuppin’ that I have taken for supporting you. Sir, I believe that in the next coming debate it is absolutely vital that you take it to Obama and that you hit him where it hits” [sic]. The crowd exploded. “ACORN is out there, we have Reverend Wright, all of these shady characters that surrounded him. I am begging you, sir.” McCain told the man that he would take his advice—but that he also will offer a “positive plan of action” to address the financial crisis.
Michael Shear and Perry Bacon pick up the torch in this morning’s WaPo with “Anger Is Crowd’s Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally.”
There were shouts of “Nobama” and “Socialist” at the mention of the Democratic presidential nominee. There were boos, middle fingers turned up and thumbs turned down as a media caravan moved through the crowd Thursday for a midday town hall gathering featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin.
[Harris quotes redacted]
In recent days, a campaign that embraced the mantra of “Country First” but is flagging in the polls and scrambling for a way to close the gap as the nation’s economy slides into shambles has found itself at the center of an outpouring of raw emotion rare in a presidential race.
“There’s 26 days and people are looking at the very serious possibility that there’s a chance that Obama might get in, and they don’t like that,” said Ian Eltrich, 28, as he filed out of the crowded sports complex.
“I’m mad! I’m really mad!” another man said, taking the microphone and refusing to surrender it easily, even when McCain tried to agree with him.
Sheesh. Look: It’s the closing days of a long, polarizing campaign. We’ve been whipped up to believe that this is The Most Important Election in American History and that The Fate of America’s Future is at stake. McCain is losing. Obama is winning. The culmination of all this is that some McCain supporters are frustrated.
So what?
This has been the case as long as I can remember. Certainly, we saw it in 2004, as Kerry supporters simply could not believe that we were about to re-elect George W. Bush. Heck, we saw it from supporters of Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and other losing candidates in this year’s primaries. People who are enthusiastic enough about a candidate to show up at a rally are naturally going to have a hard time dealing with the fact that their fellow partisans/countrymen don’t share their view. That’s especially for those afflicted with Pauline Kael Syndrome and therefore can’t even imagine what kind of people would vote for the other candidate.
While the existence of public polls can skew the election results that they purportedly are trying to predict, they also have the salutary effect of helping people come to terms with these things. People in, say, San Francisco probably found it hard to believe that Bush was likely to win last time but they were at least prepared for the possibility. Similarly, people in, say, Birmingham (or, more accurately, its affluent suburbs) are coming to grips with the likelihood that Barack Obama is going to be their next president.
I know nothing about James T. Harris. To the extent that he’s a proxy for others, though, he’s far more likely dealing with Stage 3 in the in the grief process rather than a generally bitter, angry individual.
Lt.Gen. Brent Scrowcroft, GEN David Petraeus, and Atlantic Council President and CEO Fred Kempe
I had the privilege of sitting in on an Atlantic Council meeting with General David Petraeus this afternoon. He’s making the rounds in Washington in preparation for taking over CENTCOM. He mostly came to listen to selected members of our Strategic Advisors Group but he also shared his thoughts with us on the important challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he termed “the long theater in the Long War.”
The bottom line is that winning in Afghanistan will require “sustained commitment” from the United States and NATO on the military front but, far more importantly, on the diplomatic and development fronts.
Tyler Cowen puts a lot of the blame for the financial crisis on leverage. He links to Robert Frank, who writes,
In financial markets, asset bubbles cause real trouble when investors can borrow freely to expand their holdings. To prevent such bubbles, we must limit the amounts that people can invest with borrowed money.
I want to extend the point to cover government, where the chief characteristic is playing with other people’s money. Big Finance and Big Government have much in common. Both are coveted by Harvard graduates. Both are characterized by an arrogant sense of entitlement and importance.
Instead of thinking of the pending bailouts and financial regulation as a new era of government supervisions of markets, think of it as preserving the system in which a Harvard elite controls other people’s money. In fact, very little is likely to change. Reading the news stories about how Secretary Paulson plans to implement the bailout, it seems as though the same people will be in charge of the money. Print some new business cards, change the logo on the front from “Goldman Sachs” to “U.S. Treasury,” and everything else continues as it was. It’s just that it becomes a lot more difficult for ordinary people to opt out of using the elite’s money management services.
That is exactly right. If anyone objects to the notion of leverage as “playing with other people’s money”, then by the same logic they have to object to government…virtually all of it since the entire budget and every penny the government spends is other people’s money. If playing with other people’s money makes one irresponsible then the most irresponsible people in this country are the President, every Senator, every Representative, every state and elected official and every single bureuacrat. They are playing with other people’s money and based on the current financial crisis and the state of the economy they are doing a pretty crappy job of being responsible. American politicians, and politicians in general, are not wise, courageous leaders who make tough choices during crises. They are the exact opposite, they are foolish, and cowards who take the easy road during a crisis lest they lose the one thing they crave the most, the power they have aquired. I find them all to be loathesome.
Responding to the implication that Democrats are trying to steal the election with fraudulent voter registration, a correspondent sent along this NYT report from yesterday’s edition:
States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.
Still, because Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year, according to state election officials, any heightened screening of new applications may affect their party’s supporters disproportionately. The screening or trimming of voter registration lists in the six states — Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina — could also result in problems at the polls on Election Day: people who have been removed from the rolls are likely to show up only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers. Some states allow such voters to cast provisional ballots. But they are often not counted because they require added verification.
Although much attention this year has been focused on the millions of new voters being added to the rolls by the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama, there has been far less notice given to the number of voters being dropped from those same rolls.
States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.
The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote. Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio seem to be improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters.
In addition to the six swing states, three more states appear to be violating federal law. Alabama and Georgia seem to be improperly using Social Security information to screen registration applications from new voters. And Louisiana appears to have removed thousands of voters after the federal deadline for taking such action.
This is indeed problematic and, because it involves state action, it’s especially so. It differs from the allegations against ACORN, which is apparently incentivizing people to commit registration fraud, in that problem here appears to be bureaucratic incompetence and/or overzealousness in the pursuit of good intentions. But it’s nonetheless a bad outcome. Election fraud is a mostly theoretical problem in the United States and these measures are causing far, far more harm than good.
It seems to me that combining two measures highly unpopular with each of the major political parties would solve a lot of this mess. Why not simply do away with voter registration altogether while requiring the presentation of a government-issued, address bearing identification card at the polls? A standard drivers’ license would demonstrate that one is 1) of age and 2) lives in the state/precinct/ward, etc. Localities that exclude felons would have to come up with some way of encoding that information on the card in a way that protects privacy, I suppose, but it shouldn’t be that complicated.
