Stickybuffalo.com

so i do this thing sometimes, for perverse reasons i don’t fully understand, where i email spammers back. i doubt anybody ever reads them, but i get some jollies out of it.

i think this is the first time i’ve written one of these emails back to a list that i willingly signed up for.

stimulus:

from Mitch Stewart, BarackObama.com info@barackobama.com
reply-to info@barackobama.com
to josh@stickybuffalo.com
date Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:05 AM
subject Now, it’s our turn

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Mitch Stewart, BarackObama.com wrote:

>
> Joshua –
>
> Last night, President Obama called on our representatives to pass health reform that brings stability and security to Americans who have insurance, affordable coverage to those who don’t, and reins in the cost of care.
>
> Now, it’s our turn. After last night’s speech, members of Congress have no doubt about where the President stands. But to win this fight, we must show that Americans from every state and every background support his plan — and we need Congress to do the same.
>
> Click here to call your representatives, and then tell us how it went. According to our records, you live in Iowa’s 2nd congressional district. Please call:
>
> Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Cedar Rapids office at (319) 363-6832
> Sen. Tom Harkin’s Cedar Rapids office at (319) 365-4504
> Rep. Dave Loebsack’s Iowa City office at (319) 351-0789
>
>
> (Not your representatives? Click here to look yours up.)
>
> Call your representatives, and tell whoever answers where you are from and that you watched the President’s address.
>
> Then tell them that you want your representatives to support the President’s plan, ask them where they stand — and thank them if they already clearly support it.
>
> Don’t forget to click here to let us know what they said.
>
> Hundreds of thousands of folks will be calling, so please try again if you get a busy signal.
>
> This movement has brought us to a historic moment where reform is within reach. Now your energy and commitment are needed to get us the rest of the way.
>
> Please call today:
>
> http://my.barackobama.com/CongressCall
>
> Mitch
>
> Mitch Stewart
> Director
> Organizing for America
>
>Donate
>
>
> Paid for by Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee — 430 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
>
> This email was sent to: josh@stickybuffalo.com
>
> To unsubscribe, go to: http://my.barackobama.com/unsubscribe

response:

From: josh@stickybuffalo.com
Date: Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 12:39 PM
Subject: No, it’s still HIS turn
To: info@barackobama.com

Mitch,

You guys have some solid brass cojones on you. You follow up the defining capitulation of Obama’s first (only?) term by trying to rally the faithful, mindless beasts of burden that we are, once more unto the breach. For what? You just punted on the one proposal that had a snowball’s chance in hell of addressing the problem he so eloquently outlined last night, a proposal he campaigned and won on — which, by the way, still has broad majority support among the public, despite the summer’s barrage of insane demagoguery that you guys utterly failed to anticipate or respond to.

If the President isn’t willing to fight, or even put up the pretense of willingness to fight, for the public option, where does that leave us? Where does he get off asking “us” to sacrifice more time and energy to help America swallow whatever nuggets of “reform” might be coaxed from the suppurating, campaign-contribution-lubricated asshole of Max Baucus? Maybe if we work real hard we can get ourselves mandated into buying private insurance with no provision for making it affordable — that’s one big bowl of shit I can’t wait to dig into! I’ll be sure to call my congressman right away.

Brass fucking balls. If only you’d show the same testicular fortitude in confronting the insurance lobby and the shrieking idiots, instead of pissing on the people who worked to get you elected, maybe we’d get some real reform. Until that day comes, good luck with this turd of a presidency — I’m sitting out 2012.

Josh

P.S. My favorite touch is how you remembered to include the “Donate” link at the bottom of the email. You guys are friggin’ adorable! Sorry, I need that money to pay my exponentially increasing health insurance premiums.

i woke up this morning to the sound of birds singing outside the window. no shit — birds. i’m trying hard not to find undue significance in every little thing i see today, but it’s seven degrees. nothing should be alive out there, much less creatures capable of making music.

has it only been a year since we sat in that booth at the brewpub, waiting for obama’s iowa caucus victory speech to begin?

it had been a day like this one, bright and clear and cold as hell. night had fallen hard, and early, as it does this time of year. amy and i were still warming our fingers and toes after the trek across town from our caucus location. it was amy’s first iowa caucus, and she still wore the sticker numbered “1,” proof  she was first in the door out of the hundreds who at our precinct, and a mark of pride for a newly registered Democrat. as we learned over the next few days, she was one of thousands statewide who’d attended their first party caucus, pushing turnout numbers to all-time record heights. this was no surprise, based on what we’d seen in our neighborhood: a veritable riot of twenty- and thirty-somethings, absolutely on fire for barack obama. i had seen enough caucuses to know something was up.

charlie arrived shortly and settled into a beer. he gave a similar account of his precinct across town. rubbing our hands together and sipping pints of OCBW honey hemp ale, the three of us sat there watching the results and pondering the meaning of it all.

this time last year, i wasn’t an obamaphile. i had generally favorable impressions of the guy, sure, but i was still holding fast to that skeptical-pessimist posture we’d all learned to adopt, like whipped puppies, over the past seven years of bitter experience. who the hell was this dude, anyway? i wanted to believe that the smart antiwar candidate whose buttons adorned the backpacks of my favorite students was viable. but this wasn’t 2000 or 2004, and i was in no mood to dick around with another pyhrric victory of a doomed-liberal campaign. even with the tentative victories of ‘06, the wounds were still too fresh.

that uncertainty was echoed by a friend we ran into at the caucus, a long-suffering lefty of our parents’ generation who’d “been burned too many times” by charismatic and impressive Democratic leaders who tended either to become corrupt and ineffective over time, or to be assassinated before ever getting the chance. her perspective lent a sad poignancy to the spectacle of the political neophytes who surrounded us that night, too hopped up on optimism and adrenaline to even fathom the outcome that seemed most likely to us at the time — another humiliation for progressives, and a white house ultimately occupied by, if not a republican, then another weasely self-serving empty suit of a democrat who would continue carrying out bush’s disastrous policies from sheer inertia. still, it was hard not to be a little intoxicated by all that energy, unexpected as it was, not to wonder in the back of the mind: what if?

i wish i could say i allowed myself to get swept up in the obama movement then and there, but it took a couple more months. the only outcome i had hoped for on caucus night was a decisive defeat of hillary clinton, who struck me as exactly the kind of pro-war, corporatist political parasite who would guarantee another four years of the odious status quo. (i needn’t have worried; at our precinct, at least, hillary didn’t even reach viability, her supporters all but laughed out of the auditorium with zero delegates to show for their troubles.) throughout 2007 i’d been more or less equally impressed by obama, edwards, richardson and biden, and was prepared to caucus for obama if it came down to a close contest between him and clinton. but i also liked john edwards’ message and wanted to see him stay in the primary race a while longer, so when the register poll that week showed obama with a strong lead it seemed safe to caucus for edwards. (i’ve since come to regret that support, not because i give a shit about his pissant marital infidelities, but because of his monstrous act of political malpractice — when i think about the fact that he would’ve allowed himself to be the democratic nominee in 2008 knowing that bombshell could drop at any time and blow the whole election, i could kick the bastard’s teeth in.)

 back at the brewpub, watching the coverage and comparing notes with friends reporting in from other precincts, a picture was emerging: the obama thing was bigger than we’d thought. he wasn’t just winning decisively among the same old caucus stalwarts who dutifully pull on heavy coats and boots every four januaries and trudge out into the night to pick a candidate. obama was driving huge turnout among new, never-followed-politics-before voters. lots of them. that was my first inkling that in some ways maybe it didn’t matter who barack obama was or what he stood for; the important thing, the interesting thing, was the movement he represented. the people who’d been primed for politicization by a decade of republican farce and atrocity and were just waiting to be mobilized.

more precincts reports rolled in, interspersed with bemused commentary on the evening’s proceedings on the GOP side — miserable attendance, and a surge of support for mike huckabee, of all people. you could almost feel the collective shrug as the room’s attention drifted back to what was obviously the Real Story. we ordered another pitcher. charlie fiddled with his iPod, trying to pull down county-by-county numbers from the pitiful wifi signal that would waft into the pub from time to time. edwards and clinton, in turn, each marched out and delivered chipper concessions, eagerly looking forward to new hampshire.

by the time obama took the stage, there was silence throughout the bar. people on their way out stopped and stood there in their winter coats, listening. i don’t remember much of what he said, but the way he said it and the way his crowd responded was like nothing i’d ever seen before. the word “alchemy” comes to mind. i’d heard he was good, even seen him work a crowd in iowa city the year before, but this was something altogether singular to behold. and it hit me like a frying pan to the head.

“he’s going to win,” i said, twisting around in the booth to see amy and charlie. “he’s going to be president.” it wasn’t  a prediction. it was a sudden jolt of crystal-clear perception, spoken with the slack-jawed guilelessness of one who has just processed the punchline to a joke told five minutes earlier. a simple extrapolation of facts and processes already in motion: right time, right place, right guy. and he was simply too smart and competent to fuck it up.

there followed several weeks of campaign sturm and drang, during which my impressions of obama as a political supergenius grew stronger, though i still withheld judgment as to whether this was necessarily a good thing. for a while there i suppose i rooted for him more out of animosity toward hillary clinton, who had morphed before our eyes from an unreliable, underprincipled and entitled but otherwise more-or-less capable leader, into nothing short of a political horror show.

but that’s water under the bridge. obama made a believer of me in march, when i heard the “a more perfect union” speech — an epiphany already well documented here. a few other moments from the campaign stand out… the feeling i had, watching the speech in berlin, that it might soon be possible once again to venture out into the world with a U.S. passport and my head held high. the calm and reason he exuded amidst the abject panic of september’s bank implosions. the people i met while out door-knocking in godforsaken flooded-out little post-farm-economy towns and shitty section-8 apartment buildings along the highway, or humping voter registration forms up and down the ped mall. and the eyeball-popping euphoria of election night, after ohio was called… all indelible memories. but this morning, watching the inaugural festivities on TV, wishing i was there in the capitol freezing my ass off with ben and the gajillions of others who are witnessing this moment firsthand, it’s last january that’s on my mind. it’s cold — ungodly, unmercifully cold — but spring is coming.

happy new year, america! i love you all.

(more…)

(the “result” numbers here are based on MSNBC’s map.)

on the overall result, i’m astonished to see that i out-pessimisted ben on this one, posting the most conservative and — to my great delight — least accurate electoral prediction of the panel. gray’s cockeyed optimism, meanwhile, turned out to be scary-accurate: he nailed the EV count, assuming these numbers are stable. if we should happen to see NC shift to mccain in the final count, charlie would take over the title of Supreme Handicapper, with mark a close second in either case.

for individual states, the entire panel called PA, VA, CO, NM, GA, AZ & IA correctly. charlie was all alone in picking indiana for obama, as was gray with north carolina. charlie & gray also both nailed ohio, which the rest of us were afraid to believe was winnable (i’m still a little shocked). ben was the only one who ventured a guess on nebraska’s 2nd district, which was correct, though counting continues with a mccain lead of less than 600 votes at last check.

though we all accurately predicted the winner in pennsylvania, we significantly underestimated obama’s margin, and as a group we tended to lowball colorado and new mexico. the spread in nevada was also a big surprise — for me especially; i was way off.

Over the last two days of canvassing around Johnson County, IA, including some pretty rural locales, I’ve seen tremendous interest in the election, especially among minorities. I think one of the surprises tonight will be the black & brown turnout in places like Iowa that people don’t often think of as having a significant nonwhite vote. Either way, based on anecdotal evidence as well as polling, I’m confident Obama will win here by a big margin.

Ed Rendell on MSNBC a few minutes ago talked about truly astronomical turnout in the Philadelphia area, which if true could mean Pennsylvania is already out of McCain’s reach.

Virginia’s electoral system seems to be seriously fucked so we may not know the result until late, though it may not matter in the end either.

Waiting, waiting…

  

Josh's prediction

 

 

Battlegrounds:

Pennsylvania – McCain can’t win without it, so if PA goes blue it will likely mean an early night. OTOH, despite a commanding lead in the polls it’s not entirely in the bag for Barack (viz. This American Life’s slightly ominous report from the weekend before last). Obama by 3-5.

Ohio – Polls show Obama ahead, but with this state’s history of voting irregularities & out-and-out widespread disenfranchisement, I just can’t count on Ohio. McCain by 1-2.

Virginia – Should be among the first results posted, and if paired with good news out of Pennsylvania will mean it’s time to pour the champagne. Don’t know why, but I feel like Obama will squeak by with a one or two point spread.

Florida – Ditto Ohio, though there are signs of improvements to the voting system like Crist’s laudable decision to extend voting hours. Between that and Obama’s well-publicized army of lawyers and apparently kickass ground game, I feel like he could win, but not by more than a few points.

Colorado – Decisive for Obama, to the tune of 4-5 points.

New Mexico – Forget everything I said a couple of weeks ago. Obama by 5+.

Nevada – It can’t all be good news, so I’ll randomly give this one to McCain, by a negligible margin.

Shouldn’t-be-close-but-could-flip-anyway:

North Carolina – Polling ridiculously close, but feels too good to be true. If they do go for Obama, though, it will mean all bets are off in Georgia. McCain by microns.

Georgia – Holy shit. As I’ve mentioned, the idea — however far-fetched — of Georgia being in play for the Democrat gives me a boner. I don’t think it will happen, but I’ll have a change of pants handy tomorrow night just in case.

Montana – Why not? Like elsewhere in the interior west, MT has been subtly trending blue, and seems like the kind of wild-card state that could deliver an upset. What the hell — Obama by one.

Indiana – Meh. Recession or no, those crackers will never back a Democrat. Polling is tight, but I just don’t see it.

North Dakota – Like Montana, their 3 electoral votes aren’t likely to make or break either candidate. Best-case scenario is MT & ND cancel each other out.

Missouri – Who knows? Obama could definitely win it. He’s campaigning there today, but my sense overall is that MO has not been one of the top-tier priorities for the O camp, and since it’s an overwhelmingly red state by default, McCain gets the edge.

Arizona – It would add a nice bit of insult to McCain’s many injuries, but it’s probably asking too much. Anyway, we’ll likely have a winner before their results are even in, so it’ll be mostly symbolic whichever way it goes.

Okay, your turn!

DSCN0087.JPG

Originally uploaded by AyBeeDee

has joe the plumber ever had to dodge barrels flung by a rampaging ape? fuck that guy.

Western Gateway Park in downtown Des Moines on a stunningly beautiful Halloween morning

Photos from 10/31/2008 Obama rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

i arrived way too late to be anywhere near the podium, but had a pretty good spot within the spillover crowd, which extended a little over a block past the park itself. fortunately the sound system was excellent.

that white speck in the middle is barack. this is actually a much better look at him than i got with my own eyes -- give it up for zoom!

it's hard to get a good sense of the size of the crowd from these pictures, but it was quite a scene. iowa loves obama!

doesn't that look just say it all?

and with that, another miserable old fraud goes down, and a filibuster-proof senate majority becomes a legitimate possibility.

standard disclaimer about complacency and premature celebration, etc., but with obama’s prospects looking the way they do at the moment, is the presidential race is becoming just a little bit… boring? anybody else finding themselves more interested in the senate all of a sudden?

with stevens on ice, these seem to be the hot contests:

- Franken/Coleman in MN

- Lunsford/McConnell in KY

- Udall (my old congressman)/Schaffer in CO

- Merkley/Smith in OR

- Shaheen/Sununu in NH

- Hagan/Dole in NC

these are all tight contests, and most narrowly favor the democrat. assuming a sweep of all of the above, and one or two longshot flips like Martin in GA or maybe Musgrove in MS, a supermajority could happen. 

my guess is that november 4th will go down one of two ways:

obama will win, but by a relatively narrow margin — say, 5% or less in the popular vote — that will startle us with the realization of how much closer it was than everybody thought; in this case, we’ll be doing well to reach 56 in the senate, and president obama will have to contend with the semi-plausible impression of a divided electorate and the attendant, too-predictable gridlock and bipartisan half-assedness. (nevermind that bush got away with claiming a mandate on the strength of barely 51% — that was different.)

or, it will be seismic. obama wins with 300+ electoral votes, including some states like indiana that nobody thought would flip in a million years. in this scenario, we win all the close senate races and at least one or two surprise states. in which case, let’s just say that joe lieberman is going to find out what his colleagues really think of him.

if i had to guess, i’d say scenario A is more likely. but either way, it feels sooo gooood to see a corrupt motherfucker like ted stevens get some comeuppance. i’m pretty sure it makes me a bad person, but knowing that old crook is probably going to die in prison just makes me smile.

contrary to polls that show georgia remaining solid red this year, fivethirtyeight.com has analysis of registration and early voting figures that actually suggest a potential obama lead on the strength of black votes.

Think these numbers sound unreasonable? Early voting is underway in Georgia, and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, black voters do not represent 30 percent of Georgia’s early voter turnout. Instead, they represent almost 40 percent. Although early voting figures can be idiosyncratic, Barack Obama certainly seems to be having little trouble getting his vote out. Indeed, Barack Obama is winning Georgia right now.

d’you buy that?