Stickybuffalo.com

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?

So, this year, Obama’s been selling a lot of buttons, t-shirts, signs, and various other things imprinted with his logo. It’s a pretty nifty idea: run a store on your campaign website and file purchases as campaign donations. Your logo sees broader exposure, you get to report super-high donation totals each month, it’s easier for supporters who live in places without a campaign office or frequent campaign events to get campaign gear, people who would already have made donations get a little token for their trouble. Everybody wins.

But I wonder why it seems to take at least several weeks (and sometimes a few months) for orders to be shipped. I’m not complaining in a “where’s my stuff?!?” way, since Obama was gonna be getting my money even without a store on his website. I’m wondering why distributing campaign advertisements isn’t seen as more of a priority. It took my window sign almost 10 weeks to arrive, and I’ve lately been showered with apologetic emails telling me that my buttons, stickers, and t-shirts (ordered weeks ago) just might be shipping soon (though I’m not to expect them to arrive for a few weeks after they’ve shipped). That’s a lot of weeks that I could have been displaying Obama’s logo everywhere I went.

I suppose the cynical answer is that Obama doesn’t really care about people putting signs in their windows, handing out buttons to their friends, putting stickers on their cars, etc., and is really just after the money. That might be the case, though that would be a little surprising, given the amount of importance Obama’s campaign places on the ground game. The online store is supposed to generate revenue and increase campaign visibility, and I seriously doubt the Obama campaign would sacrifice one almost entirely in order to maximize the other.

Rather, it seems like they’re just being really cheap, which I can appreciate. I’m sure they want to maximize the “profit margin” of the Obama gear, and hiring cheaper, slower manufacturers and using cheaper, slower shipping options would certainly be part of that. But really, I’ll be surprised if my “first edition!!!!1!!1!!!” Obama/Biden stickers and buttons get here before election day, at which point their advertising potential will be moot, and the items themselves will either carry a neutral emotional impact or will be depressing reminders of a very bad day.

You’d think being a creative type and all that that I’d've gotten around to playing with iMovie much sooner than this, but… no. Anyway, it’s my firm belief after listening to the Dems keep repeating that McCain is “four more years of Bush” and focusing on the economy that the Obama campaign actually needs to take a page out of Bill Belichick’s playbook and go after his opponent’s strength, not his weaknesses. So I made this 30 second spot to make my point:

Took me most of this morning. Lemme know what you think… but be gentle, it’s my first time.

I’ve gotta hand it to Ustream.tv. Watching http://origin.barackobama.com/live/ I’m amazed by the quality and load balancing. The numbers of viewers regularly exceeds 2,000, yet there’s no chop or stutter. It’s even wrapped into a nice flash app that manages to get through the work firewall, no problem.

More importantly, it’s allowing me to watch Barack each day, recently in various Virginia venues, as he takes questions (Pay attention to the rules people, 1) only start talking when the mic is there, 2) girl, boy, girl, boy…) and showcases just how well he can deal with just about anything thrown at him. Why read an article from a pundit responding to the latest John McNopoly attack when I can hear Barack respond and feel that much better about the election? Granted, some of these speeches have very similar parts, but the Q&A sessions have been all over the map.

Know when to tune in via the latest technology to fill your inbox, on your cellphone, by following Barack on Twitter! You do have your phone tied to your twitter account, right?

if only being this rich was a problem for republicans

if there’s one thing that might have made a clinton supporter out of me, it would’ve been this:

[Obama] ended up voting for what he called “an improved but imperfect bill” after backing a failed attempt earlier in the day to strip the immunity provision from the bill through an amendment… Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, who had battled Mr. Obama for the nomination, voted against the [FISA] bill.

of course, had she won the nomination, i’m guessing hillary too might have felt differently about FISA — especially knowing she’d be next in line to take those fancy new executive powers out for a spin. still, at least she’s able to mimic the basic postures of leadership, which is more than i can say today for the other guy. “improved but imperfect”?? way to set the bar higher, mister reform candidate.

obama won’t take the oath of office for another six months — it is way too early for buyer’s remorse to be setting in.

there’s a lovely serendipity to the news sometimes. you absorb one mildly interesting bit of information, begin to digest and draw conclusions from it. then you notice another meme floating by, distinct from but related to the first, that complements and contextualizes what you were already thinking. then something else happens, something that harmonizes the whole thing in an immensely satisfying way.

for the last few weeks, newspapers and blogs have been peppered with little sidebar items about obama’s outreach to religious voters, including some mild expressions of surprise and curiosity at the possibility that he may actually be making inroads among evangelicals, of all people. punditical analysis has mostly been limited to the notion that jesus folk are pissed off at bush and looking to punish republicans for their failure to implement full-on theocracy; hence, they’re turning to obama the way clinton democrats were supposedly turning to mccain (so much for that theory). a secondary competing hypothesis held that evangelicals are merely susceptible to that obama magic just like everybody else — they grudgingly respect him, and even if they won’t vote for him, they’re not galvanized against him the way they were against john kerry.

there seemed to be some truth in both explanations, but there was still a piece missing. what does the obama campaign know that we don’t, that led them to court religious communities as their first step toward transitioning into general-election mode? perhaps more importantly, why does it seem to be working, without obama having to back off his socially progressive positions or cozy up to agents of intolerance?

that’s when i read about the new pew survey on religion and politics, which confirms something i’ve suspected for a while: faith and religious affiliation are fairly worthless as predictors of political behavior. in a study based on interviews with 36,000 religious americans, researchers learned the following:

- a plurality are Democrats or lean Democratic
- almost 3/4 self-identify as moderate or liberal
- a majority favor legal access to abortion in all or most cases
- a majority favor acceptance of homosexuality by society
- a majority feel that “government is too involved” in policing morality
- a majority, including 54% of evangelicals, take a dim view of adventurist foreign policy and want the government to focus on domestic issues
- a resounding 61%, again including 54% of evangelicals, favor tougher environmental regulation

in other words, the ideological views of the devout mostly mirror those of society at large — not so surprising in a country where 95% claim some form of religious or spiritual belief, including 78% who follow a christian tradition. the study goes on:

[M]ost Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith. A majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, for instance, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion. This openness to a range of religious viewpoints is in line with the great diversity of religious affiliation, belief and practice that exists in the United States.

if these findings seem counterintuitive, especially to those of us whose politics over the last generation have been formulated more or less in diametric opposition to the brutal insanity of the religious right, it’s because we’ve been force-fed a false image of christianity and christians. and in our own way, we’ve been complicit with the robertsons and dobsons in propagating the view that christians are, by definition, backward and bigoted. this is the great crime and the great tragedy of our generation in the american political left: they told us that ‘faith’ was incompatible with science and equal rights and reproductive freedom, synonymous with imperial aggression and environmental destruction, and we believed them. to barack obama’s great credit, he didn’t…