More Cognitive Dissonance

In the Wonderfully Bizarre World: "Barack Obama, the first black major-party nominee, is positioned to win the largest share of white voters of any Democrat in more than three decades, according to an exclusive Politico analysis of recent Gallup and Pew Research Center polling....No Democrat has won a majority of white voters since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. John McCain has shuffled between 48 percent and 50 percent support in recent weeks — which would be the lowest share for a Republican candidate in a two-man race since Barry Goldwater's run."

Not that I'm saying it's going to be easy. Nate Silver reports the following bizarre story on FiveThirtyEight.com:

Last week, Julie Hensley made one of her thousands of phone calls on behalf of Barack Obama. A woman answered. As Hensley ran through her short script, the husband impatiently broke in.

"Ma'am, we're voting for the n***er." And hung up.

Hensley wasn't having it. "I went and made a couple other calls but chafed over this absurdity," she told us, "so I called them back, as I still had a couple questions for the wife." This time the man answered, asked pointedly who she was, and when she replied he hung up again.

Um, yeah. Y'know, here's what I say, Alright, FINE--as long as you're voting for Obama. I don't even care right now. We'll sort it out later when he's got his hand on the Bible.

In a slightly different take, but with marked similarities, Frank Rich points out in his Sunday NY Times column: "But the other, less noticed lesson of the year has to do with the white people the McCain campaign has been pandering to. As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn't mean that the country is racist. It's past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America's defense. That includes acknowledging that the so-called liberal media, among their other failures this year, have helped ratchet up this election cycle's prevailing antiwhite bias. Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the press's default setting has been to ominously intone that "in the privacy of the voting booth" ignorant, backward whites will never vote for a black man."

Endorsements

Okay, I've gotta just get past all that for now, because we got a wide variety of more positive things ahead.

Oh, SNAP! Sarah Palin's hometown paper, the Anchorage Daily News has endorsed Obama.

The Financial Times also endorsed Obama (jeez, who's next? The Wall Street Journal???): "A campaign is a test of leadership. Mr Obama ran his superbly; Mr McCain's has often looked a shambles. After eight years of George W. Bush, the steady competence of the Obama operation commands respect. Nor should one disdain Mr Obama's way with a crowd. Good presidents engage the country's attention; great ones inspire. Mr McCain, on form, is an adequate speaker but no more. Mr Obama, on form, is as fine a political orator as the country has heard in decades. Put to the right purposes, this is no mere decoration but a priceless asset...Mr Obama's purposes do seem mostly right, though in saying this we give him the benefit of the doubt. Above all, he prizes consensus and genuinely seeks to unite the country, something it wants. His call for change struck a mighty chord in a tired and demoralised nation – and who could promise real change more credibly than Mr Obama, a black man, whose very nomination was a historic advance in US politics?"

Even Hitler is against Sarah Palin. (From the Hitler "Downfall" meme flooding YouTube, basically you take this scene from the movie Downfall and you apply subtitles railing against the topic of your choice. Eric likes this one railing against jazz music.)

By the way, on the subject of newspaper endoprsements, Editor & Publisher, continues to list all the papers around the country that have endorsed either candidate and Obama leads by an astonishing 194 to 82. 38 papers have switched from Bush to Obama this year and in major swing states and red states, Obama has endorsements from (among many others) the Miami Herald, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, St. Petersburg Times, Anchorage Daily News,The Denver Post, The Toledo Blade, Akron Beacon-Journal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Des Moines Register, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Philly Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the NC News & Observer, Charleston (WV) Gazette, The Asheville Citizen, Houston Chronicle, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.