Moving in on GOP Turf

Anyhow, enough rambling. Onto the Conservative pundits who have come over to the Dark Side.

David Brooks on Obama: "Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I'm getting nowhere with the interview, it's late in the night, he's on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he's cranky. Out of the blue I say, 'Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?' And he says, 'Yeah.' So i say, 'What did Niebuhr mean to you?' For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he's a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, 'David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you're only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.' And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

George Will: But the McCain-Palin charges have come just as the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing it is not paying for. Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts -- telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans' accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign's attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama's Chicago associations seem surreal -- or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, "like being savaged by a dead sheep."

Moving in on GOP Turf
Joe Biden returned to the campaign trail on Wednesday in Tampa, Florida: ''To have the vice presidential candidate raise the most outrageous inferences, the one John McCain's campaign is condoning, is simply wrong,'' Biden told roughly 4,000 people at the University of South Florida. ``They are attacking Barack Obama in the ugliest of ways. This is beyond disappointing. This is wrong.'' By Thursday he was in Missouri and on a roll.

Meanwhile, Obama was in Indianapolis at an Indiana rally, "We meet at a moment of great uncertainty for America," he said. "But this isn't a time for fear or panic. This is a time for resolve and leadership. I know that we can steer ourselves out of this crisis." By Thursday Obama was in Portsmouth, Ohio.

See how that works? Florida, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio. "Landslide," Democrats. Dare to dream.

NPR ran an interesting piece yesterday morning on how Obama is doing in Indiana: "At an outdoor rally, he had the crowd roaring with this closer: 'If you will stand with me, if you will work with me, if you will vote for me in 27 days, I promise you we will not just win Indiana, we will win this general election.' Behind that speech is a media and ground operation that has astonished Indiana politicos. It's a prime example of how this presidential campaign is changing America's political landscape. In 2004, President Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry didn't spend a penny on TV advertising in Indiana. No one doubted that the state would go Republican. But right now, Indiana is barely tilting toward Sen. John McCain. Obama is outspending McCain on television there by a margin of 20-to-1.Numbers like those, in Indiana and some other once-solid Republican states, seem to confirm Obama's judgment in rejecting public financing. The decision cost the Illinois senator an $84 million grant from the government, meaning he has to keep on raising money. But if he had taken the money — as McCain did — he could not spend anything beyond that. Instead, with a fundraising network that set records throughout the primaries, Obama's financial picture easily eclipses McCain's."

McCain, for his part, just can't seem to get himself in the zone. Where is he? Pennsylvania. Yah. Um, good luck with taking that state. Obama's at, what, 52%, and you're at 39%? So on Wednesday at this rally at Lehigh University in Bethlehem with Sarah Palin, he apparently called all of us "my fellow prisoners" instead of his prepared text, which was "my fellow citizens."

Sen. McCain, let me explain the concept of YouTube to you AGAIN. You see that number on the bottom next to the word "Views"? Yeah, that means that nearly 30,000 people have seen this gaffe of yours within the first eight hours, by Thursday morning 378,000 people had seen it. I check at 11 pm on Thursday and 558,000 people have viewed the clip. And see that little blue square with the "f" on it? I click on that, post it to my Facebook page and instantly the number of views goes up. Did you know that in Pennsylvania, during the primaries you won 587,000 votes? So it's kinda like, oh, if everyone who voted for you in the Republican PA primaries logged on to see that.

Maybe ask Paris Hilton for some tips-- she OBVIOUSLY has a better grasp on things than you do. Paris is back in a HIGH-larious video with Martin Sheen, the former President Josiah Bartlett on the West Wing. Paris: "I plan to bring a fake balance approach to these real problems. For example, Fo-Po." Sheen: "What is Fo-Po?" "Foreign Policy, silly!" "Of course BF! I should have known that one." Man, remember Bartlett for America? Uh-oh, I'm getting fahrklempt again.... Talk amongst yourselves...

By the way, speaking of media savvy, Obama has purchased a HALF-HOUR of airtime on CBS, NBC, and MSNBC (ironically this was reported on ABC)."The bold buy, first reported by the Hollywood Reporter and featured on the Drudge Report, will put the Obama show uninterrupted to American television sets across the country less than one week before election day. The Obama camp remains in talks with other networks to do the same on other channels." So, we have something to look forward to--kinda like Halloween candy. A half-hour primetime special on Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 8 pm. Mark your calendars!

Okay, I feel a little better now. So, HuffPo reports on the Obama transition team. While it might be perceived as arrogance, most candidates start directing a transition team as they get closer to the election. It means you don't waste time after winning the election -- you just smoothly put your operation into place. "It may or may not reflect the internal state of the campaigns' thinking, but Obama has a large, well-staffed operation going on to prepare for the presidency. As the 2008 campaign nears its conclusion, the presidential transition efforts of the two major candidates have become a study in contrasts: Sen. Barack Obama has organized an elaborate well-staffed network to prepare for his possible ascension to the White House, while Sen. John McCain has all but put off such work until after the election. The Democratic nominee has enlisted the assistance of dozens of individuals -- divided into working groups for particular federal agencies -- to produce policy agendas and lists of recommended appointees." Well, I guess, the McCain thinking goes, why waste the energy if you're not going to win.

Organization. I love order and organization. So sue me. Remember the Democratic Convention, and how well orchestrated it was? And how absurdly amateur the RNC looked like by comparison? Four days in Denver, behind the scenes in DNC.