beware. from tvol's flickr

Huge turnout forecasts a Democratic blowout.  Obama owns the hope and change message, and having a wave of new voters suggests that his message caught on.

McCain’s blather about a late-campaign surge only brings more Obama people out in the hopes of staving McCain off from stealing the campaign at the last minute.

What it might do is run cover for GOP vote stealing.  All McCain needs is a narrative, and an argument abut the liberal media bias, and he has a way to tamp down protest of the take.  All it takes is the story – enough to encourage people to go back to the polls and fight again for a candidate, rather than an independent movement for social change.

from Dan of Future's flickr photostream

The last thing keeping Obama from the Presidency is vodka (and not in the “George Bush history of alcoholism” way).  Here’s what I mean:

If you sit and stare at a potato long enough, it stops being a potato, and starts becoming vodka.

Obama has been the front runner for a couple weeks now, and as election day approaches, each poll that puts him substantially ahead of McCain increases voter and media scrutiny on him.  He receives more and more coverage as a nearly president-elect, people begin to speculate on cabinet choices, governance style, and divided government under an Obama Presidency.  Through all of this, the sense of Obama as a fresh face with endless promise begins to morph a little, and maybe wear at the edges.

At the same time, McCain begins flinging anything and everything he can at Obama, hoping that any one of them could become an excuse for a voter to change their genuine interest in Obama into an excuse not to vote for him.  “I like Obama but…” will be the shape of a McCain upset, and until Tuesday, expect everything including the kitchen sink to fly in the hope of hooking more and more “Obama, but…” voters.

McCain and the GOP have been rolling hard with their TV spots lately – the last few have been very effective, and if they started with this stuff earlier in the campaign, they had a chance.  The last 3 or 4 have been focused on single messages, to the point, and way good

First: “I am Joe the Plumber” – nice everyman type ad, does a good job of subtly otherizing Obama

Second: ‘Storm’ – a good mobile metaphor for experience that gives off a lot of associated meanings, but remains focused clean and simple on the experience issue

Third – “Ladies and Gentleman” – Takes Joe Biden’s words and flips them against Obama – a good move when Biden was selected to bolster Obama’s foreign policy credentials.  Also makes a pretty good visual argument about an externally dangerous world.

There’s nothing left to say. McCain tried to co-opt Obama’s frame with the Palin pick, and it ended up sinking him. I think people will look back and say he had a fighting chance as the voice of reason and experience next to the up-and-comer with no real background (think Celeb ad), but as soon as he tried to change tack and go for the mantle of change, he lost momentum on both fronts. It seems like McCain never fully grappled with the fact that Obama’s narrative worked because of who he is, what he looks like, and his story. It wasn’t about reform policies – how many campaign reform bills you backed, times you took on your party – Obama doesn’t look like old politics, McCain does.

Which doesn’t mean he was doomed – or slated to be in a spot as bad as the one he’s in now. The tried and true, steady hand message like the one in McCain’s Storm ad, had a shot at effectiveness – even in 2004, in the middle of the worst part of the War in Iraq, after fucking Abu Ghraib, and people went for the fear and dread over a new face, and McCain had it. But he tried to have it both ways, and Obama out classed him – in all senses of the word.

It seems like the McCain campaign is burning through a book of epithets working backwards from now (Celeb ads) to the 80s/90s (Big Government), to the 60s (Bill Ayers) all the way back to the good ol’ Red Scare 50s (this bullshit).  I’m kinda digging the old school flavor.

Anyways – the argument against Obama from the right apparently peaked when they went after Bill Ayers.  Now, folks are going after a radio interview from 2001 of Obama talking about how to interpret the Constitution.  (Srsly, as if the Constitution still mattered)  This is really the end of the line – picking through old radio clips about Constitutional Law in the hopes that it proves something about Obama’s un-Americanness.

It seems petty, but I guess the only really appeal of the clip is the tone, with Obama sounding like the elitist college professor type that folks pigeonhole him for – it might be dangerous to his campaign because it keeps him from sounding like the ‘common man’.  I suspect his is an ‘above the fray’ moment for the campaign and you’ll hear nothing more of it from Obama.

Doomed doomed doomed.

You know it. from uglyagnes' flickr photostream

McCain/Obama have done lots of talking, and lots of campaigning, but somehow they forgot to talk about:

1. Torture – I’m not talking about McCain war stories, I mean waterboarding, ‘advanced interrogation’ techniques and extraordinary rendition.  The total silence surrounding this issue means that the ‘08 election effectively establishes torture as a centerpiece of American foreign policy for the long-haul.  (The time to really end this was ‘04, right after Abu Ghraib, but Kerry refused to challenge Bush on the issue)

2. Wiretapping/Executive Authority – the real problem with the FISA bill was that it retroactively sanctioned the President’s overreaching in setting up the taps in the first place.  It’s not like spying is even popular, but I think Obama and McCain both want to have a strong Executive Branch with themselves in charge.

3. The Gulf Coast -  Hurricanes.  Wiping out whole cities.  New Orleans remains a mess, Galveston was annihilated, other parts of the coast were devastated in ways that remain invisible to most of the country.  Rebuilding the coast requires a huge investment from the Federal Government that should be the centerpiece of a bigger infrastructure rebuilding process, but both candidates were silent.

4. Immigration – McCain even authored legislation on the issue.  I guess Obama avoided it to not be seen as any more foreign than people believe him to be already, but this one isn’t going away.

5. Incarceration – Not that I expected anything out of either candidate, but holy shit 2 million people is a lot of people to have in jail.  US prison policy hurts everyone it touches, and needs to be addressed in a way that reduces the number of people put in jail.

David Frum. This man hates you. From Urban Mixer's flickr photostream

When David motherfucking Frum is able to write a Washington Post editorial on the good old days of Republican campaigning, something is up.  This man spearheaded the Bush campaign message during his first Presidency, and embodies the most effective use of divide, scare and surveil GOP electoral politics.

Yet, somehow he manages to chide his way out of responsibility for the McCain campaign message (run by fellow Bushie Steve Schmidt) that takes the last 8 years to their logical extreme.  Frum forecasts the way the Republicans will frame the first 2 years of an Obama Presidency:

1. The Good and the Bad GOP – folks will try to divide the party into radicals and moderates, and endorse a shift back to the party’s “middle ground” of deregulation and old school culture wars issues like gay marriage and creeping restrictions on a woman’s right to choose.

2. Victimhood – people on the right will once again paint Washington as the stomping grounds of the loony-left big-government eggheads, imposing a radical agenda on the Real People of America.  The Republican Party will become the party of victimhood, turning every policy into an abuse of power by the ascendant Democratic party.

The backpeddling and second guessing has already begun, and I think Democrats need to avoid self-congratulation if they want to avoid a big GOP pushback in 2010, 1994 style.

When the Sarah Palin nomination was announced, Pat Buchanan called her selection “the biggest political gamble, just about in American history”

I think we can now conclude what the payout from that gamble will be: Palin is hurting McCain big time, and she has started to out-Maverick McCain.

Palin was an unknown to America, and apparently also to the McCain campaign. Obama should hold on to that 130 million and invest in housing or something, it looks like it might be a waste to spend it in other ways.

Welcome to 1988

Oh shit – I just caught up with this story about the alleged beating of a McCain supporter in Pennsylvania – not only does it follow the form of the key Joe the Plumber and Palin/Wolves narratives of the McCain campaign, it reveals what makes this campaign season so different from the others that have gone before.

Obama proved that Lakoff was right – he’s followed many of George’s recommendations to a T, to great effect.  The most interesting part about Lakoff’s strategy is how much he talks about it – he has injected discourse about discourse into the campaign and helped make McCain’s incompetence running his race a key issue.

And that’s why Ashley Todd’s fake story about being assaulted matters.  Because it links McCain with the rhetorical tactics of the Willie Horton ad, and sinks him for playing dirty.  Progressive folks and politics in general now talks about strategic communications more than communications itself – and the beating story links McCain with a type of Attwater hardball that this discussion about communication roundly rejects.

Like this, but better. from Vincent J. Brown's flickr

When McCain decided to roll out his Bill Ayers strategy, Obama was waiting with Keating Economics.  Now that it looks like the election might take a turn for the national-security nitty-gritty, I’m interested to see what Obama has in store.

The most devastating argument against McCain is the Swiftboat: attacking him where he’s strongest.  This Village Voice article is where I think the national security/’support our troops’ argument is headed – McCain votes against vets.  There was already a disruption at the RNC about this, and I bet there’s a hoard of vets with good stories to tell about how McCain left them high and dry.