Stumper

Is Obama Actually Like Lincoln?

2008-10-06T21:51:21Z

Over at his new, must-read "Race to the Finish" blog--bookmark it if you haven't already--my NEWSWEEK colleague Howard Fineman has an excellent post up comparing Obama to Lincoln. The Illinois senator has long encouraged such comparisons; as early as 2006, for example, he likened his "reflective" temperament to Lincoln's in an interview with Jacob Weisberg. Superficially, it's easy to see the similarities: like Lincoln, Obama is a tall, lean, relatively inexperienced Illinois lawmaker who writes well, delivers uplifting speeches and represents racial progress. But Howard's item asks an important question: is the life that Obama has led--and the capacity to cope with crisis that he's developed as a result of it--actually like Lincoln's? His answer is no:

In the life Lincoln led before his victory in 1860, he was tested as perhaps no leader in America had ever been--by financial struggle, personal loss, public humiliation and political defeat. He had risen above all of that--from the humblest beginnings imaginable--to become one of the leading lawyers in Chicago. He had studied the country from the ground up and the inside out, from its farm fields and rivers to its corporate boardrooms. What testing, what true testing, has Obama ever faced besides eschewing a high-paying job out of Harvard Law School? To be blunt, his trials are a lot less Malcolm X than Obama's autobiography has made it seem. The psychological strain of being a mixed race youth in Honolulu was no doubt trying, but he had the support of well-connected and loving grandparents who saw that he had the best education available in the state of Hawaii.
To skeptics, Obama is nothing more or less than a suburban prep-school graduate who did well at Columbia and Harvard, and who smoothly propelled himself upward. He deployed his eloquence, brains and charm to build contacts among progressive foundations, elite universities and members of the extended Daley family of Chicago. Obama's community-organizing work was not very controversial (or effective); his affirmative-action syllabus at the University of Chicago Law School was earnestly PC but carefully mainstream; his famous speech against the war in Iraq in 2002 was prescient but not so heroic given the time and place: the early stages of a U.S. Senate race that would require initial liberal support. Other than his one electoral loss, in 2000, when he impetuously ran for a U.S. House seat, what political adversity or long night of the soul has Obama faced?

These are excellent questions--and ultimately I think they're at the root of why Obama appeals so easily to younger, more privileged voters (as opposed to their older, bluer-collar brethren). Former McCain strategist Mike Murphy put it best back in August: "For many, Obama reminds them of the Ivy League whiz kids they've dealt with at work during the latest downsizing. They look at him and see another bloodless young achiever coming down from the top floor to fix the ailing machine-tool company. They listen to his polished pitch in the employee cafeteria, and he wins some converts. But after he is finished, a few old-timers exchange knowing glances and mutter to one another about how young this hotshot is... Deep down, they think he'd rather hit the executive gym for a cardio workout during lunch hour than share a cheesesteak and beer with the hourly workforce." No one would've said that about the Ol' Railsplitter.

Will these doubts cost Obama the election? I doubt it. Observers underestimate the self-reinforcing aspect of Obama's improbable rise--the "If He Could Do This, He Can Do Anything" Effect--at their own peril. One side effect of the current economic meltdown is that it seems to have convinced a substantial number of skeptics--"old timers" even--to take a risk on the race's "polished" "young achiever," regardless of whether or not they can imagine buying him a brewski. For the time being, at least, these voters seem to be listening to their heads more than their hearts. Still, Howard's right to say--despite his expertly crafted campaign narrative--that we don't know much about how Obama deals with adversity. Will he be like Lincoln: fair, tough, pragmatic and wise? Or will he react more like Woodrow Wilson, the nation's other "inexperienced" president: with cerebral haughtiness? Given the country's crushing debt, tanking economy and inescapable military commitments--not to mention the transcendental challenges of global warming, energy independence and Islamic extremism--we may be about to find out the hard way.

Will McCain's New Anti-Obama Strategy Work?

2008-10-06T17:16:35Z

This is may be October--but it's not much of a surprise. In the midst of a financial crisis that's boosted Barack Obama in nearly every key battleground state and cost McCain--according to his own advisers--about "five points" in the national polls, the Republican nominee over the weekend launched an "aggressive assault on... Obama's character" in an attempt to close the polling gap by "shift[ing] the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations."

The onslaught began Saturday, when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told three separate crowds that Obama is "not a man who sees America like you and I see America"--mainly, she said, because he "is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." (She was referencing Weather Underground founder William Ayers--a man with whom Obama does not "appear to have been close," according to the New York Times, and whose "radical views and actions" Obama has never "expressed sympathy for.") It continued Sunday with GOP strategists affiliated with the McCain telling the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder that "they plan to highlight Obama's alleged contacts with individuals who they say have been linked to terrorist organizations, including controversial Columbia Prof. Rashid Khalidi, accused without real evidence of being a former PLO spokesperson." This morning, Palin resurfaced, calling on her running mate--surely not without his campaign's knowledge--to bring up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more," she said in an interview with the New York Times' Bill Kristol. "Those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that - with, I don't know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn't get up and leave - to me, that does say something about character." And in today New Mexico McCain called his opponent a "mystery, a liar, complicit in the economic crisis and an unaccomplished naïf, at all the same time."

To paraphrase the Bangles: it's just another Muddy Monday.

With less than 30 days to go until Nov. 4, it's no wonder Team McCain is going on the attack. In fact, his own operatives have made their motivations perfectly clear. "We've got to question this guy's associations," a senior Republican strategist told the Washington Post on Saturday. "Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here." This morning, a "top McCain strategist" was even more explicit in an interview with the New York Daily News. "It's a dangerous road, but we have no choice," he said. "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose." In other words, McCain believes that the only way he can win the White House is by painting Obama as a chancy, radical choice who will endanger all that America holds dear--and hoping that the electorate reverts to the Republican ticket (the "safer," more familiar option) by default. As the Arizonan's new attack ad puts it, "Obama [is] too risky for America."

There's no doubt, then, how McCain and Co. will spend the final month of the 2008 campaign. The question is: Will it work?

My hunch is no. Here's are five reasons why:

1. The Economy Isn't Going Anywhere: This morning, the Dow fell nearly 800 points, dipping below 10,000 for the first time since 2004. The U.S. economy dumped 159,000 jobs in September. Unemployment hit a five-year high. Americans have lost a combined $1 trillion in net worth over the last month alone. Whatever concerns voters might have about Obama's former minister or a guy the senator once sat on a board with pale in comparison at this point to concerns about their own economic security; the economy, simply put, is bigger than Bill Ayers. Every time Team McCain mentions Ayers, then, Obama will simply argue that his rival is ignoring the economic elephant in the room. "Senator McCain and his operatives are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance," he said yesterday in Asheville, N.C. "I want you to know that I'm going to keep on talking about the issues that matter--about the economy and health care and education and energy." As a matter of mechanics, it's going to be very difficult for McCain to transform an election occurring in the midst of the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression into a referendum on his opponent's Rolodex, especially given that...

2. Ayers and Wright Aren't Exactly "Breaking News": The Politico's Ben Smith first reported on Ayers last February; the country spent all of April talking about Wright. In other words, every "association" that Palin and McCain are intending to highlight before Nov. 4 has already been highlighted. Reporters are treating this as a story about McCain's newly negative tactics--not as an opportunity to reheat material they first served up last spring. Sure, some voters are unsettled by the fact that Obama once worked on an education project with a unrepentant (if rehabilitated) '60s radical and spent decades listening to sermons by a man who adheres to Black Liberation Theology--and they're not voting for Obama, at least in part, because of it. But given that the Illinois senator went on to win the Democratic nomination and build a sizable lead in state and national surveys after the Ayers and Wright stories first broke, it appears as if many swing voters--not conservatives, but swing voters--have largely decided that they're comfortable with Obama's past. Absent any new revelations, it's hard to imagine that old, rehashed information will change their views. The fact is, Ayers and Wright are probably priced--at least in part--into the current polling, which means...

3. There Aren't a Whole Lot of Swingers to Be Swung: If the election were held today, Obama would beat McCain 52 percent to 44 percent, with four percent of the vote going to third-party candidates (at least according to the latest Rasmussen tracking poll). Of course, the election is still a month away--which means, in theory, that McCain can still catch up. The problem for the Arizona senator is that he doesn't have much room for error. Right now (again, according to Rasmussen), 44 percent of voters say they're certain they'll vote for Obama, while a mere 38 percent say the same thing about McCain. That leaves only 14 percent of the electorate up for grabs--an eight-percent bloc that's currently leaning toward Obama plus a six-percent bloc that's currently leaning toward McCain. Imagine a room with 100 people in it. Forty-four of them are already on the left side; they're voting for Obama, no matter what. Thirty-eight are on the right side; they're sold on McCain. In the middle, eight voters are leaning to the left; six are leaning to the right. To win, Obama must simply make sure that six of his eight leaners vote Democratic; he can afford to lose two of his leaners to McCain (perhaps over Wright/Ayers/etc.) McCain, on the other hand, must retain all six of leaners AND steal six of the eight voters who currently prefer Obama. In other words, he has to double his share of the persuadable electorate between now and Nov. 4. Could it happen? It could. But it's unlikely, mainly because...

4. Last-Minute Attacks May Damage McCain As Much--if Not More--Than Obama: FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver makes an important point:

If the McCain campaign brings up William Ayers -- or Jeremiah Wright -- it will almost certainly be seen as attack politics. This might seem to be stating the obvious. But remember that this wasn't the case during the primaries. The Wright and Ayers stories were instead driven by actual news -- ABC's reporting of Wright's inflammatory sermons, for instance -- and were largely not pushed by the Clinton campaign. So unless McCain's oppo research team is sitting on some fresh news about Obama's ties to Ayers or Wright, the stories are liable to be reported as a typical partisan attack, which will impeach their credibility in the public's eyes and reduce their staying power.

The only news here is McCain's negative strategy; we've already litigated Wright and Ayers. As a result, Silver adds, "it may be quite difficult for McCain to attack Obama in this fashion without significantly damaging his own brand." For much of the cycle, McCain's net favorability rating--the gap between the percentage of voters who feel positively about him and the percentage who feel negatively--tended to rise and fall with Obama's. But while Obama's net favorables have surged to about 22 percent over the past few weeks, McCain's have plummeted to six or so. By recycling old attacks on Obama, McCain may narrow the gap between Illinois senator's positive and negative numbers. But the strategy is liable to have the same effect on McCain himself. Sure, partisans may cheer McCain's efforts. But at the end of the day, it's unlikely that McCain would emerge from a slash-and-burn campaign having increased his net favorability rating. Obama's, meanwhile, would probably still hover in the double-digits--even if it takes a few hits. That disparity--the simple fact that voters see now Obama in a more favorable light than McCain--would make it extremely difficult for the Arizonan to pry three-quarters of Obama's leaners away from him (which, again, is the only way he'll reach 50 percent in the polls). Making matters worse is the fact that...

5. The Obama Campaign Has Muddied the Waters on Riskiness and Associations: It's the least remarked-upon aspect of the current financial crisis--but perhaps the most important from a political perspective. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers late last month, Obama has used the meltdown as an opportunity to portray himself as a safe and steady leader. At the same time, he has framed McCain's every move as needlessly reckless--or, to use Team Obama's lingo, "erratic." The point? To reverse the conventional wisdom and portray McCain as the riskier choice. Obama has succeeded, at least in part: according to the latest CBS News poll, 61 percent of voters say they're very or somewhat confident in Obama's ability to handle the economy. McCain's score? A mere 49 percent. Meanwhile, 44 percent approve of Obama's handling of the financial crisis versus only 35 percent for McCain. As a result, 52 percent of voters now say that Obama is prepared to be president, up six points since late September. Earlier in this cycle, McCain would have had an easier time defining Obama as dangerous radical. But now that the electorate has witnessed Obama "in action"--and seems to have decided that it prefers his economic leadership to McCain's--the burden of proof is much higher. Swing voters now have a choice: do they believe what McCain says about Obama--i.e., "there are essential things we don't know about [him]"--or what they themselves have seen him say and do. I suspect they no longer consider Obama much of a "mystery"--and are inclined to trust their own eyes and ears over innuendo, for better or for worse. Even if this wasn't always the case.

Also complicating McCain's new message: the fact Chicago has authorized its surrogates to mention McCain's and Palin's questionable associations whenever they're asked about Wright or Ayers. That's why on Meet the Press yesterday Paul Begala "noted that McCain once 'sat on the board of a very right wing organization,' the U.S. Council for World Freedom"--a group whose parent organization" was once called "a gathering place for racists and anti-Semites" by the Anti-Defamation League. It's also why liberal journalists are complaining that Todd Palin belonged to a political party that wanted Alaska to secede from the union--and that his wife once attended "a sermon by the founder of Jews for Jesus, who argued that the Palestinian terrorist acts against Israel were God's 'judgment' on the Jews because they hadn't accepted Jesus." Finally, it's why the Obama campaign released a 13-minute documentary about McCain's involvement in the "Keating Five" scandal earlier this afternoon.

Does today's tit-for-tat represent "a new kind of politics"? Hardly. I tend to think--like most swing voters I've met--that these "guilt by association" attacks are idiotic. And Obama's Keating onslaught is particularly iffy, given that the scandal happened 17 years ago and McCain acknowledged misjudgment. That said, Chicago's aggressive posture ensures that every voter who hears about Ayers will also hear about the Alaska Independence Party. Same goes for Wright and Keating. Ultimately, if McCain can't convince swing voters that Obama is substantially riskier and more "tainted" than he is--if his attacks elicit equally irrelevant (but equally unflattering) attacks from the Dems--it's hard to see how he'll benefit from baring his teeth.

The Palin Debate, Continued: Mindless--or Priceless--Populism?

2008-10-06T13:47:24Z

Last month, atheist author Sam Harris and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson duked it out on this blog over the question of whether Sarah Palin is prepared for the presidency. Now, in the latest dead-tree NEWSWEEK, editor Jon Meacham and former Bush guru Karl Rove tackle a related question: What's the value of Palin's populism? I've excerpted the key parts of their essays below. Click through for the full read--and weigh in on the comments board.

Photos: (from left) J. Scott Applewhite / AP; Khue Bui for Newsweek

MEACHAM: A key argument for Palin, in essence, is this: Washington and Wall Street are serving their own interests rather than those of the broad whole of the country, and the moment requires a vice president who will, Cincinnatus-like, help a new president come to the rescue. The problem with the argument is that Cincinnatus knew things. Palin sometimes seems an odd combination of Chauncey Gardiner from "Being There" and Marge from "Fargo." Is this an elitist point of view? Perhaps, though it seems only reasonable and patriotic to hold candidates for high office to high standards. Elitism in this sense is not about educational or class credentials, not about where you went to school or whether you use "summer" as a verb. It is, rather, about the pursuit of excellence no matter where you started out in life. Jackson, Lincoln, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton were born to ordinary families, but they spent their lives doing extraordinary things, demonstrating an interest in, and a curiosity about, the world around them. This is much less evident in Palin's case...

We have had terrific presidents and vice presidents from humble backgrounds, and we have had terrible presidents and vice presidents from privileged ones. The unease with Palin is not class-based. It is empirically based. She is a rising political star, a young woman—she is only 44—who has done extraordinary things. It takes guts to offer oneself for election, and to serve. It is far easier to throw spitballs from the stands than it is to seek and hold office. She is a governor, and she has the courage to go into the arena. For that she should be honored and respected. If she were seeking a Senate seat, or being nominated for a cabinet post—secretary of energy, say, or interior—the conversation about her would be totally different. But she is not seeking a Senate seat, nor is she being nominated for a cabinet post, and so it is only prudent to ask whether she is in fact someone who should be president of the United States in the event of disaster. She may be ready in a year or two, but disaster does not coordinate its calendar with ours. Would we muddle through if Palin were to become president? Yes, we would, but it is worth asking whether we should have to.

ROVE: With respect, Jon misses the principal arguments for Sarah Palin. She is the governor of a state with an $11 billion operating budget, a $1.7 billion capital budget and nearly 29,000 employees; she's got more executive experience than any candidate for president or vice president this year. In Alaska she took on the state political establishment, the incumbent Republican governor and the oil companies. She's a rising star who accentuates John McCain's maverick strengths and a "hockey mom" who has developed a powerful tie to ordinary voters. That link isn't itself an argument for Palin. But being able to connect with, and inspire, the public is an asset —not a liability. As for Jon's argument against "everyday Americans" as political leaders, many great presidents have been more average than elitist. Ronald Reagan, from Eureka College, was a far better leader than Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton. Wilson would have given you 100 Supreme Court opinions he disagreed with, whether you wanted to listen or not. Barack Obama has also introduced Joe Biden
as a Joe Six-Pack, saying, "His family didn't have much money … sometimes moving in with the in-laws or working weekends to make ends meet." Biden himself rarely misses a chance to say, "I was an Irish Catholic kid from Scranton with a father who, like many of yours in tough economic times, fell on hard times." Both veep candidates are trying to portray themselves as ordinary folks.

The Filter: Oct. 6, 2008

2008-10-06T12:19:57Z

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

ECONOMIC UNRESTS SHIFTS ELECTORAL BATTLEGROUNDS
(Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
The turmoil on Wall Street and the weakening economy are changing the contours of the presidential campaign map, giving new force to Senator Barack Obama’s ambitious strategy to make incursions into Republican territory, while leading Senator John McCain to scale back his efforts to capture Democratic states. Mr. Obama has what both sides describe as serious efforts under way in at least nine states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including some that neither side thought would be on the table this close to Election Day. In a visible sign of the breadth of Mr. Obama’s aspirations, he is using North Carolina — a state that Mr. Bush won by 13 percentage points in 2004, and where Mr. Obama is now spending heavily on advertisements — as his base to prepare this weekend for the debate on Tuesday. By contrast, Mr. McCain is vigorously competing in just four states where Democrats won in 2004: Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, followed by Wisconsin and Minnesota. His decision last week to pull out of Michigan reflected in part the challenge that the declining economy has created for Republicans, given that they have held the White House for the last eight years.

ONUS ON MCCAIN TO TURN PRESIDENTIAL RACE HIS WAY
(Liz Sidoti, Associated Press)
One month before Election Day, Barack Obama sits atop battleground polls in a shrinking playing field, the economic crisis is breaking his way and he has made progress toward winning the White House. The onus is on Republican John McCain to turn the race around under exceptionally challenging circumstances--and his options are limited. McCain's advisers say the Arizona senator will ramp up his attacks in the coming days with a tougher, more focused message describing "who Obama is," including questioning his character, "liberal" record and "too risky" proposals in advertising and appearances. Obama's advisers, in turn, say he will argue that McCain is unable to articulate an economic vision that's different from President Bush's. In a new push, the Illinois senator is calling McCain's health care plan "radical."

REGISTRATION GAINS FAVOR DEMOCRATS
(Alec MacGillis and Alice Crites, Washington Post)
As the deadline for voter registration arrives today in many states, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign is poised to benefit from a wave of newcomers to the rolls in key states in numbers that far outweigh any gains made by Republicans. In the past year, the rolls have expanded by about 4 million voters in a dozen key states -- 11 Obama targets that were carried by George W. Bush in 2004 (Ohio, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico) plus Pennsylvania, the largest state carried by Sen. John F. Kerry that Sen. John McCain is targeting. In Florida, Democratic registration gains this year are more than double those made by Republicans; in Colorado and Nevada the ratio is 4 to 1, and in North Carolina it is 6 to 1. Even in states with nonpartisan registration, the trend is clear -- of the 310,000 new voters in Virginia, a disproportionate share live in Democratic strongholds. Republicans acknowledge the challenge but say Obama still has to prove he can get the new voters to the polls.

THE SPIRIT OF '76
(Stephen F. Hayes, Weekly Standard)
"As a general matter, we need to get this race back to being about Obama," says one senior adviser to McCain. A second agrees and points to Tuesday's debate as a key opportunity. "Part of what this debate is about, and the home stretch is about, is focusing the attention on Obama." It's a strategy that has worked before... Several McCain advisers believe their campaign should focus on two very similar questions for the final push of the campaign: Who is Barack Obama, and can he lead the country in these difficult times? The advisers say the campaign will work to remind voters of Obama's "corrupt" associations with Tony Rezko and with "the terrorist William Ayers." There has been no decision made as to whether the campaign will directly raise Obama's relationship to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. "Rezko and Ayers are clearly in bounds," says a top McCain adviser. "McCain has said he doesn't want to talk about Wright. If others do, then it's a topic of conversation and we can join that conversation."

IT'S OVER
(Howard Wolfson, New Republic)
Why won't the swiftboat tactics work this year? Its easy to lose sight of it in the day to day coverage, but the collapse of Wall Street in the last weeks was a seminal event in the history of our nation and our politics. To put the crisis in perspective, Americans have lost a combined 1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks alone. Just as President Bush's failures in Iraq undermined his party's historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets. Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the proper role of government for a century. In 1980 voters sided with Ronald Reagan and Republicans that government had become too big and intrusive. Then the economy worked in the Republicans' favor. Today the pendulum has swung in our direction. Republican philosophies have been discredited by events. Voters understand this. This is a big election about big issues. McCain's smallball will not work. This race will not be decided by lipsticked pigs. And John McCain can not escape that reality. The only unknowns are the size of the margin and the breadth of the Democratic advantage in the next Congress.

CAN THEY CATCH UP? OF COURSE.
(William Kristol, Weekly Standard)
The odds are against John McCain and Sarah Palin winning this election. It's not easy to make up a 6-point deficit in the last four weeks. But it can be done. Look at history. The Gore-Lieberman ticket gained about 6 points in the final two weeks of the 2000 campaign. Ford-Dole came back more than 20 points in less than two months in the fall of 1976. Both tickets were from the party holding the White House, and both were running against inexperienced, and arguably risky, opponents. What's more, this year's race has already--twice--moved by more than 6 points over a span of only a few weeks. The race went from McCain up 2 (these are the Real Clear Politics averages) on September 14 to Obama plus 6 on October 2, less than three weeks later. In the four weeks before that, the race had moved from Obama plus 5 on August 12 to McCain plus 2 on September 12. So while there's reason for McCain-Palin supporters to worry, there's no reason to despair.

ON THE ROAD
(Sean Quinn, FiveThirtyEight)
Let’s be clear. We've observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn't like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director. Only for the first time the other day did we see a McCain organizer make a single phone call. So we've now seen that once. The McCain organizers seem to operate as maître Ds. Let me escort you to your phone, sir. Pick any one of this sea of empty chairs. I'll be sitting over here if you need any assistance... “Call time,” for both campaigns, is all day, but the time when folks over 65 are generally targeted begins in late afternoon and goes til 8 or 9pm. Universally, McCain’s people stop earlier. Even when we show up at 6:15pm, we’re told we just missed the big phone bank, or to come back in 30 minutes. If we show up an hour later, we “just missed it” again. The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it's a whirlwind. People move. It's a dynamic bustle.

CANDIDATES PREPARE FOR TUESDAY'S TOWN HALL DEBATE
(Michael Abramowitz and Perry Bacon, Jr., Washington Post)
McCain appears to be engaged in especially serious preparations for Tuesday's debate, one of his last opportunities to change the trajectory of a race that may be slipping out of his control. He is certainly doing more formal preparation than he did before last month's debate in Mississippi. Since leaving Washington on Thursday, McCain has kept a light schedule, his only public appearances being two town-hall-style events in Colorado -- that will be the format of Tuesday's debate in Nashville. On Saturday and Sunday, he held three formal practice sessions, with former Ohio congressman Rob Portman standing in for Obama... Obama is preparing in Asheville, N.C., in a state where he is hoping to sway voters who typically vote Republican in presidential elections. He was joined at a resort hotel by several top aides, including strategists David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, campaign manager David Plouffe, and Greg Craig, the Washington lawyer and Clinton administration official who has portrayed McCain in practice debates. In the words of one campaign aide, Obama will seek Tuesday to continue his efforts to present himself as a "very pragmatic, non-ideological and very even-keeled" politician, one who can be trusted to take over the country at a time of uncertainty abroad and at home.

MCCAIN'S TOWNHALL PROWESS FACES LITMUS TEST IN DEBATE
(Amy Chozick, Wall Street Journal)
The Republican's performance in the second of three presidential debates -- the only one held in the format he tends to favor -- could help determine his ability to stay competitive in a race that seems to have moved against the Arizona senator over the past week. Shortly after Sen. Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in early June, Sen. McCain invited his Illinois rival to hold 10 joint town-hall meetings across the country, in which both candidates would stand together on stage and take questions from audience members. Sen. Obama declined, saying he believed the three scheduled presidential debates were sufficient... The spontaneous, unpredictable conversational style of the events and the informal interaction with voters seem to bring out the best in Sen. McCain, more than canned, oft-repeated stump speeches do. The group interaction brings out his quick wit and self-proclaimed bent for "straight talk" -- he often will engage in extended debate with a voter who disagrees with him, even saying directly that the person is wrong.

THE WRIGHT STUFF
(William Kristol, New York Times)
I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright? [Palin] didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.” I guess so. And I guess we’ll soon know McCain’s call on whether he wants to bring Wright up — perhaps at his debate with Obama Tuesday night.

OBAMA TO HIT MCCAIN ON KEATING FIVE
(Mike Allen, Politico)
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday is launching a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer. Pushing back against what it calls McCain's “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign overnight began e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends. The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

STEVE SCHMIDT: THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND JOHN MCCAIN
(Dan Morain and Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times)
In the wild ride that is the McCain presidential campaign, Steve Schmidt has been at the wheel, steering -- some say careering -- from Paris Hilton to Sarah Palin, from abrupt "suspension" to abrupt restart. Schmidt is McCain's day-to-day operations boss.Retained in a summer shake-up intended to right McCain's faltering campaign, Schmidt, 38, quickly put his stamp on the operation, aggressively attacking Democratic nominee Barack Obama, often with biting ridicule, and vying to dominate every day's news cycle. For a time, Schmidt's tactics seemed to work. Team McCain was practicing a political jujitsu that kept the Republican close in polls when the Democratic standard-bearer, given George Bush's unpopularity, should have had a significant lead. The effort peaked with the choice of Palin as McCain's running mate. Convinced that McCain needed a dramatic gesture to make the race competitive, Schmidt pressed McCain to pluck the Alaska governor from obscurity... But a month from election day, Schmidt faces his most difficult professional challenge. McCain has dropped in polls as Washington struggled to find a solution to a reeling Wall Street. Polls show voters trust Obama more than McCain to fix the economy.

MISHAPS MARK MCCAIN'S RECORD AS A NAVAL AVIATOR
(Ralph Vartabedian and Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times)
As a presidential candidate, McCain has cited his military service -- particularly his 5 1/2 years as a POW. But he has been less forthcoming about his mistakes in the cockpit. The Times interviewed men who served with McCain and located once-confidential 1960s-era accident reports and formerly classified evaluations of his squadrons during the Vietnam War. This examination of his record revealed a pilot who early in his career was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits. In today's military, a lapse in judgment that causes a crash can end a pilot's career. Though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain's record stands out. "Three mishaps are unusual," said Michael L. Barr, a former Air Force pilot with 137 combat missions in Vietnam and an internationally known aviation safety expert who teaches in USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "After the third accident, you would say: Is there a trend here in terms of his flying skills and his judgment?"... Naval aviation experts say the three accidents before McCain's deployment to Vietnam probably triggered a review to determine whether he should be allowed to continue flying.

BARRACUDA
(Noam Scheiber, New Republic)
These days, Palin is engaged in this same fight against elites, though on a considerably larger stage. "I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world," she recently told Katie Couric. "No, I've worked all my life." That hardly makes her the first politician to run on class resentments--nearly every conservative from George W. Bush to Mitt Romney has sought a bond with voters by attacking the over-educated and entitled. But more often than not these conservatives are elites themselves; hence the spectacle of Yale legacies and Harvard millionaires (and most of the Fox News executive suite) railing against wine-swilling sophisticates. Palin, by contrast, may be the first conservative politician since Nixon to experience resentment so authentically. For her, it's not so much a political tool as a motivating principle. A trip through Palin's past reveals that almost every step of her career can be understood as a reaction to elitist condescension--much of it in her own mind.

Contemplating 'The Apocalypse': 269-269

2008-10-03T21:16:50Z

Earlier today, I reported that John McCain's campaign is withdrawing from Michigan--and planning to send staffers and resources to Maine as a result. The reason: the Pine Tree State awards two of its four electoral votes by congressional district--meaning that if Barack Obama adds Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado to John Kerry's 2004 states (which is likely), but loses New Hampshire (which is possible), a McCain victory in Maine's rugged, northern Second Congressional District could break a 269-269 Electoral College tie and propel the Arizona senator to the presidency. Now comes word that Team Obama has opened another field office in Nebraska--the only other state to divvy up its electors by district. If Obama wins Nebraska's Second (which includes Omaha, the site of his new office) and McCain wins Maine's Second, then the two regions will cancel each other out--and we'll be right back where we started. From now on, Stumper will officially refer to this scenario--a 269-269 stalemate--as "The Apocalypse."

Recently, reader D.M. warned of The Apocalypse in an e-mail. "Looks like we could be 269 apiece," he or she wrote. "As bizarre as this seems, to me it is a real possibility now. I think an article about that scenario would be pretty interesting: 2000--Courts decide. 2008--House decides. I see riots and hysteria." Given the news out of Maine and Nebraska, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to explain exactly what The Apocalypse would look like--and venture a guess as to which candidate would emerge from the flaming wreckage alive.

If McCain and Obama tie--however they tie--the Constitution's 12th Amendment tasks the newly elected House of Representatives with picking the next president. Given that Democrats are expected to expand their current 235-199 majority by 12 to 16 seats, you'd expect Obama to win in a walk, right? Not quite. Giving individual members one vote each would skew the results toward big states like California and New York, so the House doesn't allow it. Instead, each state gets one vote, regardless of its population; to win a state's vote, a candidate must win the votes of a majority of its representatives. My home state of New Jersey, for example, has 13 congressmen; if seven vote for Obama and six for McCain, Obama pockets the Garden State's sole vote. He who amasses 26 state votes in the House wins the election.

At this point, Obamans--at least, crazy C-Span-watching Obamans--are probably saying, "Good. Right now, 27 states elect more Democrats than Republicans to the House. Only 21 House delegations boast Republican majorities. Obama wins!" Not so fast. Here's where things get ~~a little~~ even more complicated. For starters, those numbers may change after the election. This, at least, bodes pretty well for the Dems. According to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com--who recently created a detailed chart predicting the effect of November's results on the party composition of each House delegation--Democrats are expected to hold "somewhere between 25 and 28 delegations," while "Republicans look to have a much tougher time in getting to their magic number of 26." He continues: "if [Republicans] win all their states plus all the toss ups plus all the Democratic-leaning states, that still only gets them to 25." The problem for the Democrats, though, is that even controlling a majority of House delegations doesn't guarantee that Obama will win a majority of votes in the House's state-by-state tiebreaker. Why? Because individual House members aren't required to vote down party lines--and there may be strong political incentives for them not to. According to Silver's statistical analysis, for instance, 80 percent of tie outcomes--i.e., Obama wins Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico and loses New Hampshire--involve McCain winning the popular vote. If this happens, there will be a ton of public pressure on Democratic representatives to vote against their party. Still, one imagines that enough of them will be able to resist--perhaps by recalling a Supreme Court decision called Bush v. Gore--to swing the election to Obama.

What the men and women of the House may not be able to resist, however, is pressure within their own districts--i.e., the kind of pressure that could potentially end their careers. Over at the highly respected Cook Political Report, House analyst David Wasserman recently predicted how the chamber's 50 delegations would vote in November. He based his projections on two factors: a) each delegation's probable post-election composition and b) the local political pressures its members would face. What did he find? That "many more House Democrats would be sitting in McCain-carried districts than vice versa, and many would be under immense pressure to vote their constituents’ decision." Inevitably, McCain will have won a greater number of states than Obama, which means that to win the White House, Obama will have to convince some Democrats to vote against their states--or even their districts. An example: "if Democrat Ethan Berkowitz were to unseat longtime GOP Rep. Don Young in Alaska’s only House seat, Berkowitz"--who would have as much power in this process as California's 53-member delegation--"would almost certainly seal his own defeat in 2010 if he stuck with his party and voted against a ticket including the state’s popular GOP governor." As a result, Wasserman has divided the delegations into categories: Solid Democratic and Solid Republican; Leaning/Likely Democratic and Leaning/Likely Republican; and Toss Up. Here's the math, courtesy of Wasserman's boss, Charlie Cook:

In half of the states, control of the delegation looks firm. Fourteen seem solidly in the Democratic column in a House unit-vote election: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. And 11 seem firmly Republican: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. Another six states are leaning or are likely to vote Democratic (Arkansas, Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), bringing the Democratic count to 20. Likewise, five are leaning or are likely to go Republican (Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, and Missouri), raising the GOP total to 16. But 14 states are best described as toss-ups.

As you can see, neither Obama nor McCain is anywhere near 26 votes at this point. On one hand, the fact that Obama would be first African-American president would make it politically unpalatable to deny him the job (see: superdelegates, Democratic primary). On the other, McCain will have likely won the popular vote--an achievement that many members will be reluctant to overturn, especially when neither candidate has a clear advantage in Congress. Toss another inconvenient truth into the mix--according to Cook, "four of the toss-up states in this scenario have even-numbered House delegations, meaning that intra-delegation deadlocks could reduce the number of states available to reach the magic number 26"--and you have a recipe for political paralysis. If neither McCain nor Obama gets 26 votes, neither McCain nor Obama gets to be president.

And that, ironically enough, is what could wind up snapping the stalemate. In the case of a tie, the Constitution assigns the House to choose a president. But it asks the Senate to choose a vice president. This is a much simpler process. In November, Democrats are expected to expand their 51-49 Senate majority by five to seven seats. Each senator gets one vote; a majority wins. Which means that the incoming Senate will undoubtedly select Joe Biden as vice president. This, in turn, would give House Democrats a ton of leverage. According to the 12th Amendment, Biden would become acting president if the House fails to choose an actual POTUS by Inauguration Day. So House Democrats could present House Republicans with a choice: Either way, the American people will have a Democratic president for the next four years, they could say. It's up to you whether you want it to be the one they voted for--Obama--or the one the Senate selected for them. In which case I suspect the GOP would get on board--although not without "riots and hysteria," as reader D.M. put it.

So here's hoping we avoid The Apocalypse.

P.S. Sadly, this whole mess is--or would have been--easily avoidable. The only reason it's even a possibility is because there are an even number of electors in the Electoral College. The only reason there are an even number of electors in the Electoral College is because there are 435 representatives in Congress (the Constitution requires the number of electors to equal the number of senators [100] plus the number of representatives [435], with an allotment for Washington, D.C. equal to the smallest state ([3] thrown in for good measure). And the only reason there are 435 representatives in Congress is because ... well, there is no reason. Public Law 62-5, passed by Congress on Aug. 8, 1911, set the number of House members at 435, and we've simply stuck to it ever since. In fact, the number was so arbitrary that the law included a provision for the addition of one seat each for Arizona and New Mexico when they became states, and the number of members actually increased to 437 (temporarily) when Alaska and Hawaii became states. So there's no reason why we can't have, say, 436 representatives in Congress. Sure, it would allow each party to win an even number of House seats. But which is worse? The possibility of splitting down the middle on an occasional vote--or The Apocalypse. We report, you decide.

P.P.S. Or we could eliminate the Electoral College. Either way.

Factcheck.org: Loose with the Truth in St. Louis

2008-10-03T16:57:40Z

According to the nonpartisan researchers at Factcheck.org (a NEWSWEEK partner), Biden and Palin "were not 100 percent accurate [in St. Louis last night]--to say the least." Here's how the cookie crumbled:

Palin mistakenly claimed that troop levels in Iraq had returned to "pre-surge" levels. Levels are gradually coming down but current plans would have levels higher than pre-surge numbers through early next year, at least.
Biden incorrectly said "John McCain voted the exact same way" as Obama on a controversial troop funding bill. The two were actually on opposite sides.
Palin repeated a false claim that Obama once voted in favor of higher taxes on "families" making as little as $42,000 a year. He did not. The budget bill in question called for an increase only on singles making that amount, but a family of four would not have been affected unless they made at least $90,000 a year.
Biden wrongly claimed that McCain "voted the exact same way" as Obama on the budget bill that contained an increase on singles making as little as $42,000 a year. McCain voted against it. Biden was referring to an amendment that didn't address taxes at that income level.
Palin claimed McCain's health care plan would be "budget neutral," costing the government nothing. Independent budget experts estimate McCain's plan would cost tens of billions each year, though details are too fuzzy to allow for exact estimates.
Biden wrongly claimed that McCain had said "he wouldn't even sit down" with the government of Spain. Actually, McCain didn't reject a meeting, but simply refused to commit himself one way or the other during an interview.
Palin wrongly claimed that "millions of small businesses" would see tax increases under Obama's tax proposals. At most, several hundred thousand business owners would see increases.

For full details on these misstatements--and on additional factual disputes and dubious claims--click here.

Joe Lieberman: Man of the People

2008-10-03T16:37:20Z

Spotted on American Airlines Flight 840 from St. Louis to New York-LaGuardia: Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. Fresh from representing close friend and favored presidential candidate John McCain last night at Washington University's "Spin Row"--he told reporters that Sarah Palin "did great"--the independent legislator was seated (gasp!) in the middle of the coach cabin. (Fox News's Alan Colmes, on the other hand, was in business class. The indignity.) Here's the best shot my BlackBerry could muster (Lieberman's the fuzzy figure stowing his luggage in the overhead compartment):

"It's weird to see him sitting in coach," one flight attendant said to another. "Why?" the second attendant replied. "It's not like he's Madonna or something."

Indeed. That said, flight attendants don't usually praise Madonna for her "bipartisanship." So there's always that.

Why McCain is Leaving Michigan--and What It Means for Nov. 4

2008-10-03T15:04:45Z

Last night's debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden may not have "altered the basic contours of the race." But that doesn't mean nothing important happened yesterday. It's just that it was happening 365 miles to the northeast, in the great state of Michigan.

Lost amid all the Beltway blather and bloviation about the Showdown in St. Louis Thursday evening was one of the most significant revelations since the start of the race. John McCain, it seems, has decided to pull out of the Great Lakes State. As Politico's Jonathan Martin reported first, "McCain will go off TV in Michigan, stop dropping mail there and send most of his staff to more competitive states." The information leaked after McCain, who has watched Barack Obama surge to a sizable lead in national and swing state polls over the past few days, canceled a local event scheduled for next week. "It was always a long shot for us to win," said an aide.

That's probably accurate. But the truth is, without Michigan--which the campaign has now all but admitted that it will lose--it's very difficult to see how McCain can emerge victorious on Nov. 4. For months, McCain has made Michigan the centerpiece of his electoral offense, and with good reason. Iowa, a state that George W. Bush won in 2004, is almost certain to swing to Obama; he currently leads there by more than 10 points on average. Same goes for New Mexico, where Obama's ahead by 8. When combined with John Kerry's 251 electoral votes, those two states alone would put Obama within seven of the magic 270 mark; a single, additional win in either Colorado, Virginia, Ohio or Florida--all of which currently favor the Democrat--would put him over the top. Which is why McCain, desperate to make up ground, has long pinned his hopes on Michigan. The Arizona senator was polling within 2 points of his Illinois opponent as recently as Sept. 10.

Unfortunately, the recent avalanche of distressing economic news--especially impactful in a state with the nation's highest level of unemployment--seems to have moved the expensive Great Lakes State out of McCain's reach. The two polls released since Sept. 24--PPP and the Detroit Free Press--show Obama ahead by 10 and 13 points, respectively, and his average lead has more than tripled (from 2 percent to 7 percent) over the past three weeks. McCain's internal polling likely confirms these margins (otherwise, he'd be staying put). As a result, Republican strategists I spoke to last night in St. Louis said that the Republican nominee would now reinvest his Michigan resources in a quartet of Kerry states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and New Hampshire. "He could take any one of them," an RNC bigwig told me.

But while the GOP is outwardly optimistic, a closer look at the numbers shows that McCain is no stronger in these states than in Michigan. McCain's strongest pick-up possibility is probably the unpredictable Granite State, where Obama now leads by an average of 4 points but where McCain has a long history of electoral success. Still, the senator would need more than New Hampshire's four electoral votes to make up for likely losses in Iowa and New Mexico--and neither Wisconsin, Minnesota or Pennsylvania is currently leaning his way. In Wisconsin, he trails by 5 points; in Minnesota, he lags by 5.7; and in Pennsylvania, he's behind by nearly 8. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, a site that blends current polling with demographic statistics and past electoral results to generate remarkably accurate Election Day projections--see its primary season record here--the only Kerry state that McCain has a better chance of capturing than Michigan (13 percent) is New Hampshire (37 percent). Pennsylvania, at 14 percent, is a wash; Minnesota and Wisconsin (8 percent each) are probably out of reach.

Ultimately, then, McCain's Michigan withdrawal underscores how limited his electoral map has become. In confirming the news, McCain field director Mike DuHaime was quick to note that the campaign would move staff to Maine, which awards its electoral votes by congressional district. The announcement was revealing. Apparently, the McCain campaign is now staking its path to victory, at least in part, on Obama winning Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado and losing New Hampshire, which would result in a 269-269 draw--at which point McCain would turn to Maine's Second Congressional District (where Kerry won 52-46) for the tie-breaking vote. The problem with this scenario, though, is that's there's no room for error. For Maine to matter, Obama would have to lose his 4-point lead in New Hampshire; his 2-point lead in Ohio; his 3-point lead in Florida; his 0.5-point lead in Nevada; his 0.5 lead in North Carolina; and his 2.4-point lead in Virginia. Not one of them--all of them. Meanwhile, Maine's second district would have to break sharply with the rest of the state, which currently favors Obama by 7.6 percent. Could it happen? Sure. These stats are based on current polling, and as September showed us, voter preferences still fluctuate in response to events. It's just that at this point, Obama has a 7 or 8 plausible paths to 270--and McCain has only one. So for now it doesn't look likely.

The Filter: Oct. 3, 2008

2008-10-03T11:41:14Z

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

IN DEBATE, REPUBLICAN TICKET SURVIVES ONE TEST
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
Gov. Sarah Palin made it through the vice-presidential debate on Thursday without doing any obvious damage to the Republican presidential ticket. By surviving her encounter with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. and quelling some of the talk about her basic qualifications for high office, she may even have done Senator John McCain a bit of good, freeing him to focus on the other troubles shadowing his campaign. It was not a tipping point for the embattled Republican presidential ticket, the bad night that many Republicans had feared. But neither did it constitute the turning point the McCain campaign was looking for after a stretch of several weeks in which Senator Barack Obama seemed to be gaining the upper hand in the race. Even if he no longer has to be on the defensive about Ms. Palin, Mr. McCain still faces a tough environment with barely a month until the election.

PALIN MEETS EXPECTATIONS BUT STILL FALLS SHORT
(John F. Harris and Mike Allen, Politico)
Millions of Americans were watching Thursday night’s vice-presidential debate waiting for a demolition derby moment — another crash by GOP running mate Sarah Palin, another serving of raw material for the writers at "Saturday Night Live." By that standard, she got out alive, though there were white-knuckle moments along the way: questions that were answered with painfully obvious talking points that betrayed scant knowledge of the issue at hand, and sometimes little relevance to the question that had been asked... It is hard to count any objective measures by which Biden did not clearly win the encounter. She looked like she was trying to get people to take her seriously. He looked like he was running for vice president. His answers were more responsive to the questions, far more detailed and less rhetorical. On at least ten occasions, Palin gave answers that were nonspecific, completely generic, pivoted away from the question at hand, or simply ignored it: on global warming, an Iraq exit strategy, Iran and Pakistan, Iranian diplomacy, Israel-Palestine (and a follow-up), the nuclear trigger, interventionism, Cheney's vice presidency and her own greatest weakness.

PALIN THE POPULIST
(Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal)
She killed. She had him at "Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?" She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man. She was not petrified but peppy. The whole debate was about Sarah Palin. She is not a person of thought but of action. Interviews are about thinking, about reflecting, marshaling data and integrating it into an answer. Debates are more active, more propelled—they are thrust and parry. They are for campaigners. She is a campaigner. Her syntax did not hold, but her magnetism did. At one point she literally winked at the nation. As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there. This was classic "talk over the heads of the media straight to the people," and it is a long time since I've seen it done so well, though so transparently. There were moments when she seemed to be doing an infomercial pitch for charm in politics. But it was an effective infomercial.

JOE BIDEN--INSPIRED VEEP PICK
(Noam Scheiber, New Republic)
My completely impressionistic take on Palin's performance tonight is that it mirrorred her campaign performance so far (if not quite as dramatically): When Palin started off, you thought, "Wow, she seems so fresh--so human and easy to relate to. How can we compete with that?" Then, as the debate wore on, you thought, "Hmm, okay, she still seems human, but not quite what I'm looking for in a vice president." And, by the end, as the vacuous answers piled up, it was more like, "Good God, keep this woman away from the Oval Office." Which is the story of the last month, too. Palin just isn't a candidate who wears well over any extended period of time, whether it's a 90-minute debate or a 60-day campaign. The reason is that she only has one mode: human and relateable. That's fine when the topic is middle-class pain. But there are whole classes of issues--foreign policy chief among them--where human and relateable aren't what you're looking for, even if you're an uninformed voter.

SOME FACTS ADRIFT IN VEEP DEBATE
(Calvin Woodward, Associated Press)
Republican Sarah Palin criticized a version of a Barack Obama health care plan that doesn't exist and Democrat Joe Biden clung to a misleading charge about Republicans and big oil when the two clashed in the vice presidential debate Thursday. Some examples of facts cast adrift in the debate: PALIN: Said of Democratic presidential candidate Obama: "94 times he voted to increase taxes or not support a tax reduction." THE FACTS: The dubious count includes repetitive votes as well as votes to cut taxes for the middle class while raising them on the rich. An analysis by factcheck.org found that 23 of the votes were for measures that would have produced no tax increase at all, seven were in favor of measures that would have lowered taxes for many, 11 would have increased taxes on only those making more than $1 million a year. BIDEN: Complained about "economic policies of the last eight years" that led to "excessive deregulation." THE FACTS: Biden voted for 1999 deregulation that liberal groups are blaming for part of the financial crisis today. The law allowed Wall Street investment banks to create the kind of mortgage-related securities at the core of the problem now. The law was widely backed by Republicans as well as by Democratic President Clinton, who argues it has stopped the crisis today from being worse.

HAIL MARY VS. COOL BARRY
(Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post)
You can't blame McCain. In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool. In the primary campaign, Obama was cool as in hip. Now Obama is cool as in collected. He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory. He has not at all distinguished himself in this economic crisis -- nor, one might add, in any other during his national career -- but detachment has served him well. He understands that this election, like the election of 1980, demands only one thing of the challenger: Make yourself acceptable. Once Ronald Reagan convinced America that he was not menacing, he won in a landslide. If Obama convinces the electorate he is not too exotic or green or unprepared, he wins as well.

The Tale of Two Debates

2008-10-03T04:03:43Z

First things first: they both survived.

For accuracy's sake, though, we should probably consider referring to tonight's "Showdown in St. Louis" as the "Showdowns in St. Louis." It was the Tale of Two Debates. In one ring we watched Sarah Palin battling Tina Fey's impression of Sarah Palin. In the other we saw Joe Biden jousting with John McCain. They both delivered somewhat uneven performances--but both "won" their individual bouts. The question is which one moved his or her boss closer to victory on Nov. 4.

Palin's plan was simple: deliver your talking points and pivot to an attack on Barack Obama--regardless of what moderator Gwen Ifill asks. The results of this strategy were mixed. For one thing, Palin's frequent attempts to bait Biden into making one of his famous "gaffes" or saying something "condescending"--she repeatedly sought to provoke his ire by pointing out issues (i.e., Iraq war funding, experience) on which he and Obama have parted ways in the past--did not succeed. Not only did Biden resist the temptation to pull a Lazio and charge her podium, but he delivered crisp, clear ripostes that began with the words "that charge is not true" instead of, say, "Governor Palin is lying." Biden was so focused on being polite, in fact, that the one time he said "Sarah," he immediately reverted to "Governor." That said, Palin did manage to keep her rival on the defensive--especially on raising taxes--for substantial stretches of the debate. That's always a plus.

Palin was her strongest, though, when transitioning from the topic at hand to a folksy, emotive talking point--an attempt, as she put it, "to talk straight to the American people and let 'em know my track record" regardless of what "[Biden] or the moderator want to hear." When Ifill tried to steer the conversation to Capitol Hill, for example--did we see the "worst of Washington or the best of Washington... play out" in recent Congressional jockeying over the bailout bill?--Palin detoured to the soccer field: "You know, I think a good barometer here... is to go to a kid's soccer game on Saturday, and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, 'How are you feeling about the economy?' And I'll bet you, you're going to hear some fear in that parent's voice." To practiced ears, "soccer" sounded like a line that Palin had memorized and repeated. But for voters who'd only seen her fumbling through the Katie Couric interviews--or had only seen SNL satirizing her fumbles--Palin sounded clear enough, compelling enough and common-sensical enough to come across as a competent public figure (as opposed to a caricature of incompetence). Throughout the debate, she reverted to this mode again and again, mentioning her "Joe Six-Pack" roots in "Middle America" one minute and admitting that it was time to stop "fingerpointing" and move past Bush's "blunders" the next. It was the main reason she "exceeded expectations."

The problem for Palin, however, was that she often seemed to run out of (or simply spew out) talking points--at which point her answers would disintegrate into the confusing "blizzards of words" that Charlie Gibson recently endured. Asked about the causes of climate change, for example, the Alaskan seemed unable to muster an intelligible response. "I'm not one to attribute every man--activity of man to the changes in the climate," she said. "There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.... What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?" Asked what circumstances would force her to deploy America’s nuclear weaponry, Palin chose to answer a different question. “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet," she said. "So those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.” And her riff on Israel was similarly scrambled:

A two-state solution is the solution. And Secretary Rice, having recently met with leaders on one side or the other there, also, still in these waning days of the Bush administration, trying to forge that peace, and that needs to be done, and that will be top of an agenda item, also, under a McCain-Palin administration. Israel is our strongest and best ally in the Middle East. We have got to assure them that we will never allow a second Holocaust, despite, again, warnings from Iran and any other country that would seek to destroy Israel, that that is what they would like to see.

There was an argument in there somewhere. But it was buried amid a pile-up of talking points.

This isn't to say Palin bombed. Far from it. Over the course of 90 minutes, she sounded smart, savvy and spunky enough, often enough, to seem to belong on stage--and to give commentators the grist they needed to call it a comeback. (That's why she's better suited to debates than network interviews: no filter, plenty of time.) But there were simply too many of these "huh?" moments--especially near the end of the event--to convince the 60 percent of voters who told ABC News this week that Palin is unprepared for the presidency that they're mistaken. Her trajectory tonight mirrored her trajectory since St. Paul--solid at the start, shakier over time. In St. Louis, Palin proved she can be an able communicator--and prevented herself from becoming a perpetual punchline. But I doubt that she convinced many skeptical swing voters that she's qualified to lead the free world.

This readiness deficit redounds to Biden's--and by extension Obama's--benefit. Biden didn't have a perfect night. His performance seemed to veer from muted to blustery, and it took him half an hour to find his footing. But he never seemed arrogant, condescending or chauvinistic. He never blathered on endlessly. And he certainly never put his foot in his mouth. More importantly, Biden did what he came to do--make a clear case against John McCain. And he did it with answers that were more detailed, less rhetorical and far more responsive to the questions than Palin's. You may disagree with his arguments. Many will. But it's impossible to say he wasn't polite, persuasive and well-informed. In fact, he even out-emoted Palin, silently fighting back tears while recalling his son’s near-death after the horrific car accident that killed his wife and daughter in 1972. People are "looking for help," he said, choking up. "They're not looking for more of the same."

Ultimately, partisans will ignore the errors and find much to cheer in each candidate's performance. But when it comes to the all-important swing voters, Biden may have the edge. Unlike pundits, undecideds don't come equipped with unique, finely-calibrated expectations for each candidate. Unlike partisans, they're not preconditioned to support the politician who flatters their ideological biases. They're just looking for the most plausible president--or in this case, vice president. Palin delivered an appealing performance. But I suspect that undecideds will see Biden as more vice-presidential.

So far, the surveys seem to support my hunch. CNN's quick-release poll gave the debate to the Delaware senator, 51 percent to 36 percent, and 46 percent of undecided voters surveyed by CBS News agreed (21 percent thought Palin won). Palin's problem wasn't likability: 54 percent of CNN respondents picked Palin in that category; only 36 percent chose Biden. It was preparedness. In fact, the debate didn't move Palin's readiness meter one iota: 54 percent of voters said she wasn't qualified to be president before the debate, and 53 percent said the same thing afterwards. Are these stats the final say? Hardly. But even if the voters ultimately decide that the Showdowns in St. Louis were a draw, there's no chance that they'll prove impactful enough to alter the basic contours of the race. Right now, Obama leads by an average of six points and has broken 50 percent in several polls--with only 33 days to go. For McCain, a tie won't do the trick.

In other words, survival is all well and good. But it's not the same thing as winning.

UPDATE, Oct. 3: For an analysis of each candidate's factual missteps, click here.

Liveblogging... and Beyond

2008-10-03T00:44:13Z

NEWSWEEK editors Carl Sullivan, Mark Coatney, Arlyn Tobias Gajilan and Patrick Enright are liveblogging tonight's vice-presidential debate HERE.

For my preview, click HERE.

I'm in St. Louis, watching live--from the press file. I'll be back after the show with my analysis.

Granholm, on Playing Palin

2008-10-02T22:58:11Z

By Sarah Kliff

Tina Fey may be the most popular woman playing Sarah Palin these days. But she's not the most influential. That honor goes to Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who has been tapped by Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden to stand in for Palin as he prepares for Thursday night's debate. Granholm is the first female to win her state's highest office; she was first elected in 2002, after serving four years as the state's first female attorney general.

Biden, Granholm and a handful of top campaign aides have spent the first half of this week at the Wilmington Sheraton Suites getting ready to rumble. One adviser in the room, who did not want to be named discussing campaign strategy, describes the prep sessions as more conversational than a formal mock debate might be. The group is focused on countering Palin's "prepared one-liner and quick jab" style. The campaign chose Granholm, this source says, "because she's a stellar debater who crushed Amway heir Dick Devos in her own debates in 2006 and herself had run in 2002 as an outsider and reformer."

Several days into her stint as Palin surrogate, Granholm spoke with NEWSWEEK about the Alaska governor, what she and the politician she's playing have in common—and why debating a woman is different from debating a man. Excerpts:

KLIFF: What was your reaction to being asked to help prep Senator Biden?
Granholm: As you can imagine, it is such a great honor to be asked to participate in such a meaningful way in this all-important presidential election. I think the world of Joe Biden—and even more so after this experience… I'd met him before, certainly, but we had never worked together as intensely as we have over the past few days.

How have you been preparing him?
I'm not going to comment on the prep. It's still pre-debate, so I'm going to avoid those questions.

In general, do you think there's a difference between debating a male and a female opponent?
I do think, generally, it is more difficult for a man to debate a woman. I think that citizens have certain expectations still ingrained in them about how men and women should behave and comport themselves. And for both sides, there are pitfalls.

Such as?
As a man, you don't want to be perceived as beating up on a woman. As a woman, you don't want to be perceived as being shrill or unlikable or harsh. I think those are things that I'm sure both sides are keeping in mind.

How have you prepared for your own debates, mostly against male opponents?
I've really tried to show that I can throw a punch and could take a punch. You're in there playing in the big leagues, playing with the big boys; you've got to show that you can throw and land some punches of your own.

Do you think that women are judged differently when they run for office?
Women often use that Ann Richards line about how you have to be twice as good as a woman to be considered as good as a man … That sort of striving to be twice as good, either in your credentials or in your ability to govern, is very important for a woman, because there aren't that many of us yet in these positions. You have to really demonstrate that you are capable of taking this on.

What about how they run and present themselves?
I… hate to say it, but women running for office have to run like a man. The fact that you're a woman is obvious. You don't need to talk about it. I would encourage women to downplay the gender issue as much as you can. If you're married with kids, obviously the voters want to know about your family. But I never put the kids or the mom thing out on Front Street because they're electing an executive. Being a mom clearly demonstrates that you can relate to what people are feeling and experiencing, and you don't want to hide that because that's part of why you'd be an effective executive. But you're not running as a mom, you're running as an executive, and that's what [voters] want. Most people want responsible executives. You have to be pragmatic. They want someone who is a fiscal tightwad usually and able to make tough decisions. I think you have to convey to people that you are the best executive around.

Has gender played a role in your races?
[I'm always asked] how can she do it when she has kids at home. It happens to every woman that runs. You just sort of have to blow it off and say, 'I'm sure you ask that same question of my male counterpart who happens to have kids.' That's just part of the deal.

You first ran for statewide office in 1998, when you were elected attorney general in Michigan. Looking at this presidential election, has anything changed over the past decade?
The fact that Sarah Palin can openly talk about her family and have the kids be part of the campaign and all of that, which is something that men have done for a long time that women haven't really done. So I do think things have changed. It's not only accepted, but people are applauding that. When I first ran, the counsel was really, 'People don't want to know about all that.' I do think that's evolved. I think that has evolved with respect to people just accepting that women are good executives, can get things done.

In all seriousness, do you see any similarities between yourself and Governor Palin?
We're governors. There are the obvious comparisons: we have kids in sports, and I attend the parent-teacher conferences just like she does. So I think there are those similarities, certainly. We're both first female governors.

One Biden aide described both of you as outsiders and reformers.
That's true, too. I think women can do that because it's obvious if there's not been a woman in that position, you're going to bring a different perspective no matter what. So it's natural for women to take on that role as outsider.

READ THE REST HERE.

Photos: Bill Pugliano / Getty Images (left); Henny Ray Abrams / AP

Two from the Road...

2008-10-02T21:15:56Z

ITEM! When Sen. Joe Biden's campaign plane landed at Signature Flight Support in St. Louis this afternoon around 4:00 p.m Eastern, Gov. Sarah Palin's plane was still on the tarmac. How did I know? Because Palin's plane actually says "McCain-Palin"--unlike Biden's, which features the name of Minneapolis's low-cost Sun Country carrier:

Wasn't Obama supposed to be the candidate with all the cash?

ITEM! The meal on board Joe Force One this afternoon was the appropriately named "Philadelphia Executive Pack": a cheesesteak or chicken cheesesteak with a soft pretzel and Tastykake on the side:

Clearly this was some sort of pre-debate comfort food for Sen. Biden, who lives well within the suburban orbit of Philadelphia. (As it was for Stumper, who grew up on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River.) My only question is whether it was the "Breakfast of Champions" sort of comfort food--or more like a last meal.

Hotcha! Thank you ladies and germs. I'll be here all week.

From Plouffe's Lips to Your Ears: Tonight's Spin ... Today!

2008-10-02T20:17:35Z

Joe Biden and wife Jill arrive in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS--If you've never seen a presidential campaign manager hold an "availability" with a gaggle of national political reporters--they call it an "avail" for short--then you should ... well, consider yourself blessed. Basically, the campaign manager meanders toward the hacks; the hacks swarm like a flock of hornets, waving their tiny digital recorders in the air and shouting questions; and the campaign manager spews out answers as if he were an incredibly unconvincing automaton sent back from the future with nothing but inane talking points installed in his neural-net processor. It's riveting.

I mention this because on the flight this afternoon from Wilmington, Del., to St. Louis, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe--a boyish, buzzcut fellow who smiles inexplicably after every sentence, giving him the air of someone who's perpetually pleased with himself--sauntered back to the press section of the cabin and held a pre-debate avail. Nothing he said resembled normal human speech in the slightest. But what Plouffe's answers did reveal is how Team Obama plans to spin tonight's event. Because when it comes to presidential debates, it doesn't matter what actually happens on stage--the campaigns already know what they're going to say about it. (This goes for Team McCain as well, which has gotten itself in a ridiculous snit over the selection of Gwen Ifil as moderator.) Here's what I heard from my front-row seat:

If Palin does well tonight, Plouffe and Co. will simply dismiss her performance as an entertaining sideshow, claiming that voters want something more serious from their leaders. "I'm sure this will be a very entertaining debate tonight," he said. "We expect that she'll have very witty, biting lines that she'll get off, and all of you who are like figure-skating judges will give her some credit for that. But we think that the American people who are watching at home tonight, who are thinking of their challenges and fundamentally unhappy with the direction of the country ... We think that Joe Biden will do a very good job of speaking to them. Tonight's important, but so is [the presidential debates scheduled for] next Tuesday and Oct. 15." In fact, you're almost certain to hear Plouffe recycle his dismissive "witty and biting" assessment if Palin throws a few good jabs--he repeated it three times over the course of our 10-minute conversation.

Team Obama also has a defense ready if Biden unleashes one of his famous gaffes: call it an example of his plainspoken honesty, then quickly shift the spotlight to McCain's policies. "Joe Biden's just going to talk about what's in his heart," Plouffe said. "He's just an honest person, a plainspoken person. I'm sure there will be a gaffe watch tonight. But the gaffes that matter are what George Bush has done to the country and what John McCain wants to do." Also watch for the Obama folks to criticize McCain--more in sorrow than in anger--for engaging in behavior as "small" as latching onto a slip on the tongue: "Listen, this a big-stakes election and they keep trying to take it small. Tactics that the McCain campaign is engaged in at the end of the day do their campaign a disservice. I believe that with all of my heart."

And what, you ask, if it's Palin who makes a mistake? Expect Team Obama to link her error to the narrative they've been trying to attach to McCain for the past few weeks: that he's unreliable and even "erratic." As Plouffe put it on the plane, "we've had a consistent, relentless focus on the middle class. We think consistency matters in politics. There's been an erraticness in the McCain campaign over the last 10 days that I think has puzzled voters. So we'll see what [Governor] Palin does tonight."

Finally, don't be surprised if Chicago does a little gloating--assuming Biden emerges unscathed. In typical "expectations game" mode, Plouffe at first told us that Palin was an "extremely good debater." He then upped his assessment to "a great debater" who "won each debate [in Alaska] convincingly." By the end of the avail, he was heralding Palin as "one of the best debaters in American politics." At that, reporters started to laugh. "No really, she is!" countered Plouffe. If Biden somehow manages to vanquish one of the most formidable orators in the history of humankind tonight, Plouffe will surely want to boast about it, right?

Not that I'd expect the American people to take him any more seriously than we did.

Palin! The Musical

2008-10-02T18:13:53Z

College campuses have, since 1988, played host to the presidential debates. And those college campuses are traditionally littered with unnecessarily high numbers of a cappella singing groups (more than18,000 students singing at 1,200 campuses, to be precise). So it was only a matter of time before the twain would meet: introducing two presidentially themed, a cappella tunes, "I've Got a Crush on Joe Biden" and "I've Got a Crush on Sarah Palin," courtesy of Washington University's After Dark singing group here at the St. Louis debate site.

According to one reporter at the student newspaper here, After Dark found out that they would be performing on the "CBS Early Show" yesterday, wrote their lyrics last night and practiced this morning, before the show went live at 5:30 a.m. Working in a short time frame, they did a pretty admirable job. One particularly choice lyric, from the Palin confessional:

Well she's from the coldest state
A surprising candidate
She's in the NRA cause she hunts moose

She really wants to drill
But the bailout makes her ill
She's my favorite hockey mom
'Cause I got a crush on Sarah Palin

New campaign rally theme song, perhaps?